Patients who self-analyze in poor health are more likely to get sick, catch colds and catch viruses, finds this new study.
Psychologists from Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania (USA) conducted a study with 360 healthy adults, with an average age of 33, whom they asked to self-assess their health using a questionnaire (self-rated health or “Self-Rated Health” (SFR), an indicator commonly used to measure the opinion of individuals on their general state of health). Each volunteer could answer either “excellent”, “very good”, “good”, “average” or “poor”. As all were in good health, none chose “weak”, and only 2% answered “average”.
Self-assessment of health often seems fair
Then, these individuals were put in contact with a virus. The researchers found that almost a third of the participants had developed a common cold and that those who had self-rated their health as “very good”, “good” or “fair” were twice as likely to be affected by this virus as those who had rated their health as “excellent”.
Individuals may be able to predict how their immune system will react to a virus. “The explanation for such a link can be given by emotions, sensations, diffuse symptoms, subtle changes in the dysfunction of the immune system that warns that something is wrong even before clinical symptoms appear”, explains Sheldon Cohen, the lead author of this study. “These are otherwise certain elements that we perceive in our body and which are not detectable by the doctor”.
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