I thought the conversation about the saccharine water and the placebo effect in mice was very interesting. I was wondering if any studies have been done that can show that behavior can also negatively impact the immune system.
It seems that when pregnant women get sick from a certain type of food during pregnancy, they tend to feel nauseous or get ill from that food later on after the pregnancy. I've heard similar stories with people that get food poisoning. I wonder if this has to do with the body thinking that it will get sick from that same food because it has in the past. I would think that this would be a "reverse" placebo-effect in the sense that something that causes problems once in the body will be associated in the mind as always being a problem causer.
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When very simple process is tested through a study, placebo vs experiment can demonstrate significant difference (I mean significant here is statistical significance). This era is not easy for researcher anymore because simply explainable things are pretty much already tested. In addition to that, human is very complex entity and many things can not be so straightforward. When I was working for cancer research, we had a study to test ginger pills to reduce nausea for chemotherapy. It seemed the result was not really obvious. Many recent sophisticated statistical methods allow to reduce effect of factors other than testing, but still challenging.
ReplyDeleteI bet you could put together a simple experiment to try and test that hypothesis, such as giving a negative stimulus (needle stick, electric shock, etc.) to mouse along with an immunosupressive agent such as steroids, anti-CD3 ab, etc... Do this a few times and then just give the negative stimulus and measure the arm of the immune system you have been intermittantly suppressing.
ReplyDeleteActually, people who get chemotherapy show the effect. It is known that people get sick or vomit before getting actual chemo drugs after 2nd cycle of chemotherapy.
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