Immunity Health News

Rose hips may provide an effective treatment for Rheumatoid arthritis, according to recent research.

Severely affected patients already being treated with conventional drugs experienced significant improvement after taking capsules of rose-hip powder for six months, a pilot study showed. More.

At the same time, research was presented at the Annual European Congress of Rheumatology in Barcelona, Spain, suggesting that alcohol reduced the chances of developing R.a.:

The benefits were seen when a person drank three servings of alcohol a week and when there was [sic] ten units a week there was even more protection. More.

In ages past, one type of mead was made with rosehips. That might save you having to organize two drinks! here’s the recipe from beertown.org:

Rose Hip Mead, served at AHA Conference Herb and Spice Beer

Ingredients: for 3 gallons:*12 lb. Orange Blossom Honey*2 gallons spring water*1 T Dry malt extract*15 gm white wine yeast*3 lb dried rose hips in secondary*

Instructions: Heat must to 150F for 20 minutes. Chill. Pitch yeast. Ferment. Transfer to secondary on top of rose hips. rack to tertiary and top up. When clear, rack and bottle. Share with friends.

Take a look at this blog entry on detox diets.

Specifically, it outlines how these extreme diets result in vitamin deficiency, a depressed immune system and muscle tissue breakdown, among other things.

This is in addition to the fact that the more you diet, the more your metabolism slows down and makes it easier to put on weight, harder to take it off. This can become a destructive spiral of dieting and putting the weight back on. Diets are rarely a long term fix.

An article in the journal American Psychologist suggests that massage has a host of health benefits.

Research on massage by psychologists at the Touch Research Institute and from other fields, such as nursing, shows it lessens stress, depression and anxiety. Massage also decreases pain associated with migraines, lower-back stress and fibromyalgia. Self-massage can even reduce cravings for cigarettes. And it’s been proven to help hypertension by reducing diastolic blood pressure. (See Further Reading.)

The benefits of massage come from stimulating pressure receptors in the brain, says Field. “Most people don’t know that. They might do light stroking, but that doesn’t help and really is aversive to most people.”

These receptors are long and well-insulated nerve fibers–much more insulated than pain receptors, she adds. “Say, for example, you hit your funny bone and you rub it. The pain message is transmitted more slowly than the pressure message, so it gets turned off and you stop experiencing pain.”

According to Field, many types of exercise provide the same stimulation as massage. Yoga, for example, is really a type of self-massage because it involves pushing against a surface or another limb, so it stimulates the pressure receptors. Even using a loofah or natural brush in the shower can stimulate these receptors.

The receptors stimulate the vagus nerve–one of 12 cranial nerves–which connects to the heart and digestive tract, among other body parts. When stimulated, the branch to the heart can slow the heart rate, for example. “So, it’s a very big nerve system and it seems to be actively involved in releasing serotonin and decreasing the stress hormone cortisol,” says Field.

When cortisol decreases, stress is reduced and immune cells receive a boost. In pain syndromes such as migraine, arthritis and lower-back pain, Field says massage can improve deep sleep, which can help relieve pain. “One of the major culprits in terms of pain syndromes is lack of sleep,” she points out.

With diseases like cancer and HIV/AIDS, Field notes, the benefits of massage are not only reduced stress and depressive symptoms, but also an increase in immune functioning. “We’ve found that whether we’re studying pain or psychiatric problems or attention problems, autoimmune problems such as diabetes, and immune-system problems like cancer, they all benefit from massage.”

A recent post on signonsandiego.com points to “research suggesting that running a marathon depresses the immune system for three to 72 hours and thus increases the susceptibility to upper respiratory tract infections.”

Because the runner’s immune system is working hard to repair the thousands of microscopic damage to the muscles, the immune system diverts its “attention” to that damage and is vulnerable to other infections, especially upper respiratory tract infections, which are more common in marathoners than in non-runners.

The post suggests taking antioxidants like Vitamin C to combat the free radicals–byproducts of aerobic metabolism which appear to play a role in promoting the muscle-damage induced inflammatory response–and following these seven guidelines:

1. Keep other life stresses to a minimum.
2. Eat a well-balanced diet.
3. Obtain adequate sleep.
4. Avoid putting hands to eyes and nose.
5. Avoid sick people and large crowds.
6. Avoid overtraining and rapid weight loss.
7. Use carbohydrates beverages before, during and after marathon races and long training runs.

Here’s a nice common sense list of things to do to boost the immune system, apart from any sorts of supplements. It’s a healthy reminder about some of the choices we make which overtax our bodies — things like sleep. Remember sleep?

An article in The West Australian is trying to prepare Aussies for winter colds by recommending a healthy regimen of coitus as an immune booster.

But does sex really have an effect on the immune system, I mean in a way more significant than, say, walking up a couple of flights of stairs? The article doesn’t seem to point to any direct research.

On the one hand,

“People with a more active sex life are usually a bit fitter and more in shape. They are also in a better mental framework and being in a relationship and having social networks is also important (to the immune system)” he said.

But on the other,

But you should avoid too much exercise and too much sex, because this runs the risk of deleting white cells.

Is there any research out there that directly links sexual activity to an increased effectiveness of the immune system? Pravda’s English language site had an article in 2004 reporting research by Manfred Schedlovski, a Swiss researcher from Zurich. Apparently Dr. Schedlovski’s research showed an increase in the number of phagocytes in the blood after sexual climax, from which we might infer that regular sex makes people more likely to fight infection.

Is there anyone out there with the science about this?

(Of course, if it turns out not to be true, will it really matter? Just how much incentive do we need, anyway?)