Cold comfort Are the mind and body linked? That once-contentious statement, now generally accepted as fact, has become a hot topic of scientific investigation. We'll take up the question of whether social support and emotional health can heal shortly. But first, let's look at whether they can keep a person healthy in the first place. Sheldon Cohen, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, has long investigated the health effects of stress and social support. In studies that only the Kleenex company could love, Cohen and his colleagues deliberately infect volunteers with cold viruses. Then they look at who gets sick. (To figure out who gets sickest, he even puts the used tissues on a scale. More mucus = more illness.) Only one word for that: Yuk. To convert the act of spraying cold viruses into human snouts from sadism to science, Cohen subjects his subjects to various emotional and social measurements before getting out the sneezy squeezy bottle. That gives him data on the social and emotional condition of those who later get sick.

		To measure the perceived level of stress, the researchers ask questions like, "Do you feel on top of things?"
		To measure stress caused by life events, they ask, for example, "Were you divorced within the last year?"
		To learn about negative moods, they ask, "Are you feeling anxious or depressed?"

In a study in Britain, conducted between 1986 and 1989, 82 percent of the volunteers were infected with the same virus that had been snorted into their schnozes. (Note: you couldn't satisfy the researchers by getting just any cold. You had to mount an antibody (defined) response to the same virus they'd given you, and you also had to get a significant number of cold symptoms. And you had to catch the cold from the deliberate dosing: the subjects were isolated during the study.) Stress -- it's great for the tissue makers... So guess who actually got sick? Twenty-seven percent of the least stressed, and 50 percent of the most stressed -- or should that be best-stressed? (See "Psychological Stress and Susceptibility" in the bibliography). From that work, Cohen concluded that, "Highly stressed persons had higher rates of clinical colds irrespective of the stress scale," meaning that perceived stress and actual life-event stress were equally problematic. Stress, he says, seems to be "associated with the suppression of a general resistance process in the host, leaving persons susceptible to multiple infectious agents..." By that he means that the results for all five cold viruses were similar. More recently, Cohen helped mastermind the three-year Pittsburgh Cold Study, in which 276 subjects were subjected to a similar torture. The newer study had certain refinements -- a better gauge of illness intensity, and an added measurement of the level of natural killer cells (defined) in the blood. Using a scoring system that distinguished short-term from long-term stress, Cohen found that not just any stress was correlated with the sneezes, but mainly lengthy ones (stresses, not sneezes). Those with a stress that lasted longer than a month were 2.2 times as likely to get a cold as the least-stressed individuals. Curiously, stresses that lasted longer than six months were only slightly more problematic than the one-month stresses. What, among the possible causes for stress, were the most harmful? Not overdue library books. Not ornery spouses. Not even a whining vanload of toddlers. Work. That's right -- people suffering long-term (more than one month of on-the-job stress) had four times as much chance of catching a cold as those blessed non-stressed people. Got any ideas for staying healthy, cold-wise? The Why Files Staff: Terry Devitt, editor; Darrell Schulte, webmaster; Dave Tenenbaum and Brian Mattmiller, feature writers; Susan Trebach, team leader

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