Orange County Register
Health and Science
Thursday, November 9, 2000
Health: Researcher find it can stimulate
mental activity and aid the immune system.
By Andrew Quinn - Reuters
San Francisco
Forget exercise, Forget chicken soup. Forget
sleep, vitamins and heredity.
Want to stay healthy? Play bridge. A new study
by a University of California, Berkeley, researcher indicates that playing contract
bridge leaves people with higher numbers of immune cells.
"People are aware that voluntary activities
like positive thinking and prayer work to keep us healthy, but no one has had a mechanism,"
said Marian Cleeves Diamond, a professor of integrative biology at Berkeley.
Daimond's study presented in New Orleans this
week at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, could be the first evidence that
the human cortex, which is subject to voluntary control, can play a role in stimulating
the immune system.
"These data, though preliminary, show
that brain activity affects the immune system, and support the possibility of us
learning to voluntarily control the level of white blood cells to help combat disease
and other illnesses," she said.
Diamond's study is founded on some 15 years
of research into rat and mouse brains in which researchers have sought to identify
a specific area of the cortex that might play a role in the body's immune response.
For the human element of the research, she
selected players in women's Bridge Club in Orinda.
Bridge was selected as the game because it
was seen as likely to stimulate an area of the brain, the dorsolateral cortex, that
might influence the immune system.
"Contract bridge was ideal for what we
were after," she said.
"Bridge players plan ahead, they use working
memory, they deal with sequencing, initiation and numerous other higher order functions
with which the dorsolateral cortex is involved."
Diamond and her team divided the 12 women,
all in theirs 70s and 80s, into three groups, and had each group play 90 minutes
of bridge.
In blood samples taken both before and after
the games, the subjects all revealed changes in the levels of CD-4 positive T-cells,
the white blood cells that patrol the body in search of viruses and other invaders.
Diamond said that in two of the groups, the
levels of these T-cells increased significantly. The third group showed only a slight
increase, not enough to be statistically significant. The rise in the number of CD-4
cells was the only change visible in all of the blood tests.
Diamond cautioned that her findings were preliminary,
and said that more research needed to be done to nail down the relationship between
the cerebral cortex and the human immune system. But she added that, as preliminary
findings go, these were both encouraging and exciting.
"Since we know the function of this particular
area of the brain, through voluntary control we may perhaps learn to change our immune
system positively," she said in an interview. "That is what is causing
the excitement."