Misery in the Genes

A professor finds DNA that can turn emotional stress into physical illness

By Noah Berger for The ChronicleMisery isn’t just depressing, it’s bad for your health. People going through stressful events, like divorce, are more likely to get sick. People who are HIV-positive see their condition worsen more quickly if they don’t have good social support. But nobody knows exactly how mental stress causes illness and death. 

Now a study by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles and several other institutions has come up with an actual biological pathway: a chain of molecules that connects stress to disease through genes. The scientists also learned that some people can get through tough times without ruining their health, thanks to a particular genetic variation that breaks the chain. 

The study, published this spring in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is wildly multidisciplinary, spanning psychology, molecular biology, immunology, and epidemiology. That posed challenges in lining up grants, says Steven W. Cole, an associate professor of medicine at UCLA, who led the research. But the study’s success signals the growth and increasing sophistication of Mr. Cole’s field, psychoneuroimmunology, the study of connections between mind and health. 

Robert Ader, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester, coined the discipline’s name around 1980, when he was studying animals that could be psychologically “tricked” into suppressing their immune systems. The animals were fed saccharin-flavored water and simultaneously dosed with a drug that suppressed the immune system. Later, just the taste of saccharin was enough to suppress their immune systems. Psychology appeared to affect biology. 

“That was not received with open arms by the immunology community,” Mr. Ader says. Thirty years later, however, it is more established that the brain and immune system are linked. …

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