Think of trying to boost your immune system, and you might focus on a healthy diet, getting enough sleep or even cold water swimming.
But our immune response could also be enhanced by the power of positive thinking, at least when it comes to getting vaccinated, a study has shown.
People who learned to fire up their brain’s “reward centre”, by imagining positive experiences while getting feedback on its activity from a brain scanner, had a stronger response to getting the hepatitis B vaccine.
While the study was small, it could help people maximise their response to vaccines in real life. It also sheds light on the mysterious placebo effect – when people’s illness symptoms improve purely because they expect to get better even though they have received no treatment.
Doctors have long known of links between the mind and the body – for instance, people often find that physical symptoms are worsened by stress.
Those same links are probably also responsible for the placebo effect. The phenomenon is seen in most drug trials, when people improve after taking “dummy pills”, which look like real medicines but have no active ingredients – but doctors have not yet found a way to reliably harness it in real life.
The placebo effect arises within a range of medical conditions, including those involving our response to infections and vaccines.
Animal research has suggested the effect may involve part of the brain called the ventral tegmental area (VTA), also known to be involved in processing rewarding experiences.
So, researchers wondered if activating this area in people might similarly boost immunity. They chose the hepatitis B vaccine, as for most adults, this is an optional vaccine.
Thinking positive before the vaccine
The 85 volunteers were asked to lie inside a brain scanner while thinking about a variety of different subjects. Over four days, each person was repeatedly given their score from one to 10 to show activity in the reward area. Through trial and error, some learned to raise activity in their reward centre.
“There was a wide variety of strategies, but they all had in common the fact that you consider something happening in the future that you wish for,” said Dr Nitzan Lubianiker, a neuroscientist at Yale University, who was involved in the study, published in the journal Nature Medicine.
“One imagined someone they like in a romantic situation. Another person imagined that they’re done with school with great success, and they get a desired job. A third person thought that they were preparing something they like to eat and eating it afterwards.”
All the volunteers were then given the vaccine within 20 minutes of the final training session. Those who successfully learned to boost their reward centre activity had higher levels of antibodies three months later.
The effect might have arisen during evolution because when animals mate or eat, they may be exposed to bacteria or viruses and so would need a stronger immune response, said Dr Tamar Koren, a pathologist at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, who was also involved in the study. “It makes sense that the body would develop some kind of protective mechanism,” she said.
Today, when people have positive expectations that they will be cured by some medical treatment, it may also activate the brain’s reward centre, triggering the same immune boosting effect.
In the study, the differences in antibody levels were modest and everyone would probably have been protected against catching hepatitis B. But the effect could be more useful if it were harnessed when people get vaccinated against flu, where antibody levels vary more widely, said Koren.
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Professor Stafford Lightman, a neuroscientist at the University of Bristol who wasn’t involved in the study, said researchers now need to see if they can help people activate the same area of the brain without needing feedback from a brain scanner.
“It shows that there appears to be a pathway related to antibodies,” he said. “It now needs to be tested without a scanner.”
As well as improving people’s vaccine response, the approach might be one day be turned into a way of coaxing people’s immune systems to destroy cancer, said Kyungdeok Kim, a researcher at Washington University in St Louis. “The findings open new avenues for treating numerous medical conditions.”
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