Dr. Soram's Integrative Medicine
Practical Complementary and Alternative Medicine
This “thing” called stress has become a household term since shortly after Hans Selye, M.D., D.Sc., F.R.S., coined the term in 1936, and defined it as “the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change.”
But while we all know what stress feels like, it can be difficult to pin down exactly what stress is. And that’s because stress can mean a virtually infinite number of things — and as you might suspect not all of them are bad, not by a long shot.
The researchers found that the same part of your nervous system that is responsible for the fight-or-flight stress response (the sympathetic nervous system (SNS)) also controls regulatory T cells, which are used by your body to end an immune response once the threatening foreign invader has been destroyed.
“We show for the first time that the nervous system controls the central immune police cells, called regulatory T cells,” said Robert E. Cone, Ph.D., a senior researcher at the University of Connecticut Health Center, in ScienceDaily. “This further shows that it is imperative to concentrate on the neuro-immune interactions and to understand how these two different systems, the immune and nervous systems, interact.”
Their new research on mice revealed that the sympathetic nervous system can negatively impact your immune system, and also shed some light on why stress often exacerbates autoimmune disorders like lupus, arthritis and eczema.
