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By Keith Mulvihill
NEW YORK, Mar 14 (Reuters Health) - People with very active social lives and high levels of stress are more likely to catch colds, researchers report. These social butterflies should consider cutting back on social activities until they feel more relaxed, study finding suggest.
"These people are likely to be exposed to more viruses. This fact combined with an immune sytem that does not respond as well under stress causes them to be more susceptible to upper respiratory infections," said lead author Natalie Hamrick, a graduate student in psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Hamrick presented the results of the study at the meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society last week in Monterey, California.
In the study, 114 study participants filled out a questionnaire that assessed various stressful life events such as divorce, an unwanted career change, the death of a loved one or an illness.
The investigators also asked participants about their social relationships and how often they had social contacts with family members, friends, co-workers, and community and religious organization members.
The researchers attempted to establish how diverse a social network each participant had to determine if there was a relationship between negative life events and the common cold, Hamrick explained.
"Those who had increased negative life experiences coupled with a busy social schedule that included interacting with many different people were more likely to get sick," Hamrick told Reuters Health.
"We also saw a small protective effect for those with a high level of social networking and...low levels of stress in their lives. These people showed a lower rate of sickness," she noted.
Out of the 114 people that the research team followed for 12 weeks, 60% developed a cold. These people said they had high levels of stress due to negative life events and also encountered many people due to a very active social and work schedule.
Of those individuals with heavy social calendars and low stress, only 10% came down with a cold. Hamrick also reported that 22% of the people who were less socially active but had high stress also caught colds. Eighteen percent of the people who became ill had low stress and a not-very-active social life.
"The bottom line is that if you experience a large number of negative life events, you might want to consider limiting your contact with a lot of people, or wash your hands often," she suggested.
In a related study also by Hamrick and colleagues, blood and saliva levels of chemicals related to stress, such as cortisol, were measured in the same 114 study participants. The researchers measured the levels during a low- or no-stress situation and compared those levels with a sample taken during a stressful situation.
This information was coupled with negative life event information that was gathered from the questionnaire.
"Those who reported large numbers of stressful life events who also had high levels of cortisol reactivity--resting levels compared to levels during a stressful situation--were most likely to get sick compared to people with low levels of reactivity or people with low negative life events," Hamrick told Reuters Health.
Not all people who experience increases in stress get sick, Hamrick noted.
"It is only people whose levels of cortisol increase as a result of reacting to short-term stress coupled with decreases in immune reactivity to short-term stress (who seem to be) more vulnerable to developing a cold when exposed to high stress levels," she said.
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