A Cold Fact: Long - Term Stress Can

Make You Sick

NEW YORK — Explanations for why people catch
colds are almost as numerous as the viruses that
cause colds. They range from the environmental —
living with small children, riding the subway at rush
hour, getting chilled to the bone —to the personal
— smoking too much, exercising too little, sleeping
poorly, eating erratically, working too hard.

But studies under way at Carnegie Mellon

University in Pittsburgh suggest that psychological
stress is also a very important factor in
determining who gets sick when nasal passages
are invaded by a cold-causing virus. Just any old
stress will not do. It has to be long-term stress,
lasting at least a month and stemming from a
significant problem like being fired from a job after
years of service or being left financially or
emotionally bereft by a divorce.

The researchers point out that stress is not the cause

of all colds. Rather, people under severe stress are
more likely to catch a cold when exposed to a
cold virus than people under milder stress.

Dr. Sheldon Cohen, a psychologist at Carnegie

Mellon, has spent years trying to discover why some
people frequently catch colds, while others rarely
get a sniffle. In 1991, he directed a study of 394
men and women that identified psychological stress
as an important factor.
He and researchers in Britain showed that
the higher a person's stress score on a standard test,
the more likely the person was to develop a cold
when exposed to a cold virus. Stress was an
important risk factor even when smoking, lack of
exercise, poor diet, disturbed sleep and alcohol
consumption were considered. In the studies,
financed by the National Institute of Mental
Health, Dr. Cohen and colleagues at the University
of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the University
of Virginia Health Sciences Center subjected 276
healthy volunteers aged 18 to 55 to physical,
social and psychological examinations before pla-
cing them in quarantine and depositing cold viruses
in their nasal passages.
On each of the next five days, the
volunteers, paid $800 each, were examined to
determine who became infected by the virus and
who then developed the telltale symptoms of a cold.
The team reported in June in the Journal of the
American Medical Association that the volunteers
with the most ties to relatives, friends and
community were the least likely to catch a cold. The
relationship between having many social
connections and being relatively immune to colds
held even though viruses spread easily from person
to person
Although this finding would seem
counterintuitive, Dr. Cohen said that other
researchers also have found that "having many
different kinds of social relationships helps to
protect against disease." The message from this
study, Dr. Cohen said: "Be involved and participate
in your community'' to increase your chances of
staying healthy.