Shy People More Vulnerable to Viruses
Dec. 24 -- Scientists believe they are close to answering a question that has baffled them for centuries:
Why are people who are introverted, or shy, more vulnerable to infectious diseases, including AIDS, than people who are extroverted and more outgoing?
Ever since the second century physicians have wondered why personality should have any impact on health, particularly why someone of "melancholic temperament," as it was called in the days of ancient Greece, should get sick easier, and have a tougher time recovering, than your typical happy-go-lucky life of the party.
"Physicians who had a keen eye spotted this many, many years ago," says Steve Cole of the AIDS Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. Cole and his colleagues have been searching for the biological mechanism that explains that, and they think they've found it.
Reserved Racked by Stress
While studying the replication of the AIDS virus in 54 men who were in the early stages of the disease, the researchers found a rather startling fact. The men who were clinically diagnosed as introverted did not respond nearly as well to AIDS drugs as those who were more outgoing.
In fact, when given AIDS medications, the shy men's "viral load," or replication of the virus, shot up as much as 100 times faster than the more outgoing patients.
Further research has demonstrated that stress, or how people respond to stress, is the key to understanding the mystery. Shy people do not handle stress as well extroverts, and stress causes the body to release a chemical called norepinephrine that leaves the person more vulnerable to viruses.
"It looks as though sensitive people are simply wired to respond to stress more strongly than resilient people," says Bruce Naliboff of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, one of the authors of a paper reporting the research in the Dec. 15 edition of Biological Psychiatry.
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