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Shy People May Be More Susceptible to HIV |
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FRIDAY, Jan. 9 (HealthDayNews) -- The way your body responds to stress influences your susceptibility to diseases, including viruses such as HIV.
That's what researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) AIDS Institute found.
They identified the mechanism that makes introverts more prone to infection than extroverts. The study appears in a recent issue of Biological Psychiatry.
The UCLA scientists studied the effect of stress on viral replication in 54 men infected with HIV. The men were all in the early stages of the disease and otherwise in good health. They all had high T-cell counts with detectable levels of HIV in their blood.
Nervous system reactions were measured as the men did a series of stress tests, physical exercises and challenging mental tasks. This helped establish each man's "stress personality."
The researchers monitored the men's HIV viral loads and T-cell counts for 12 to 18 months. Immune system T-cells are destroyed by HIV. During the evaluation period, some of the men began antiretroviral therapy.
"We found a strong relationship between personality and HIV replication rate in the body. Shy people with high stress responses possessed higher viral loads," principal investigator Steve Cole, an assistant professor of hematology-oncology, says in a prepared statement.
Introverted men replicated the HIV virus 10 to 100 times faster than other men. Antiretroviral drugs had little impact on HIV progression in shy men. They didn't show even a 10-fold drop in their viral load. That's classified as treatment failure. Antiretroviral drugs should shrink HIV replication by at least 100-fold.
"Our findings suggest that high nervous system activity helps the virus continue replicating. Patients with high-stress personalities continued to lose T-cells -- even on the best drug therapy available. Stress sabotages their battle against this lethal disease," Cole says.
More information
Here's where you can learn more about stress.
(SOURCE: University of California, Los Angeles, news release, December 2003)
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