WHEN the adrenalin starts pumping, it鈥檚 not just your body that responds.
Stress is known to dampen the immune system. Now researchers have shown that
it can also directly affect disease-causing bacteria. Tesfaye Belay and his
colleagues at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, cultured two
species of pneumonia bacteria with and without the human stress hormones
adrenalin and noradrenalin. Both strains grew faster when one of them was
present, reaching concentrations 4000 times higher than controls in a day, Belay
reported at the American Society for Microbiology meeting in Los Angeles.
This suggests that stress hormones can help infections take hold, Belay says.
鈥淲hen people are injured, for example, they have a big increase in
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