Audiogenic Stress and Susceptibility to Infection

Abstract

Emotional or psychologic stress is often proposed as a factor which may alter the outcome of a host-parasite relationship. Over the past several years, studies in our laboratory in the UCLA Brain Research Institute have dealt with the influences of “psychologic” or CNS-mediated stress on the susceptibility of animals to viral infections. Various aspects of this subject have been reviewed (1,2). In this report, psychologic or nonspecific stress is defined as exposure to any noxious environmental stimulation that mediates responses via the CNS, which in turn stimulate other organs or systems, primarily the pituitary-adrenocortical axis, and is associated with little or no physical trauma. The first experimental stressor systems that we used were avoidance-learning in a shuttle box and confinement in snug wire mesh envelopes (3). Because a slight amount of physical trauma might have been involved with these two systems, a third system was sought. After reports became available indicating the effectiveness of audiogenic stimulation as a stressing agent (4,5), a sound stressing system was added to our studies (6,7).