According to researchers, our mental state and our brain can have a profound impact on our relationship to illness, influencing our health and our recovery.
- According to researchers, a person’s psychological state and certain areas of the brain contribute to their physical health.
- Understanding and exploiting the power of the mind over the body could notably help to reinforce the placebo effect, destroy cancers or even improve responses to vaccination.
- This discovery could also help reassess diseases that for centuries have been dismissed as psychosomatic.
Another proof of the power of the mind over the body. For decades, scientists have been trying to decipher how the brain choreographs immune responses to disease, in hopes of finding treatments for a range of disorders.
And the finding of the latest research is clear according to the scientists, who explain in an article published in Nature, that the brain could control our state of health and our recovery. Indeed, mental states can influence the body’s immune response to disease and the impact of that disease on the body.
The effects of a positive state of mind are visible on the organs
The experience of Hedva Haykin, a doctoral student at the Technion (Israeli Institute of Technology) in Haifa, is in fact in line with this discovery since, according to her work, the stimulation of a region of the brain involved in positive emotions and motivation may have influenced the healing of the heart in the event of a heart attack.
By studying tiny slices of hearts from mice that had suffered a heart attack under the microscope, she discovered that some of the samples were clearly marked by the scars left by the infarction. Others showed only patches of visible damage among red-stained bands of healthy cells. “The difference in appearance of hearts comes from the brain”, explains Hedva Haykin.
The healthier-looking samples came from mice that had received stimulation of an area of the brain involved in positive emotions and motivation. Those with scars came from unstimulated mice, says the scientist. “At first we thought it was too good to be true“, explains Hedva Haykin. It was only after repeating the experiment several times, she adds, that she was able to accept that the effect was real.
Based on experiments conducted so far, which have yet to be published, activation of this reward center in the brain – called the ventral tegmental area (VTA) – appears to trigger immune changes that contribute to the reduction of scar tissue.
The brain-immunity connection plays a real role in “psychosomatic” illnesses
The exact mechanisms are not yet known and will be the subject of further research, but researchers are increasingly beginning to decipher the biology at play behind this phenomenon. This is notably the case of the Franco-American neuroscientist Catherine Dulac and her team at Harvard University who have, for example, identified neurons, in an area of the brain called the hypothalamus, which control symptoms, in particular fever and loss of appetite, in response to an infection.
“Most people probably assume that when you feel sick it’s because bacteria or viruses are attacking your body.“, she says. But his team demonstrated that activation of these neurons could generate disease symptoms even in the absence of the pathogen.
Managing to understand and exploit this data would have significant repercussions not only concretely on medical research but also on the vision that we can have of certain diseases.
“I think we are ready to say that psychosomatic disorders can be treated differently”says Asya Rolls, the neuro-immunologist who supervises the work of the Israeli team. “It’s time for researchers and clinicians to take seriously the link between psychology and physiology”, concludes the scientist. “Even just telling people there’s a brain-immunity connection responsible for their symptoms can make a huge difference.”.
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