Jury still out on psychological intervention, immunity

While stress management and other existing therapies may be helpful to an individual's emotional state, it is premature to suppose that those therapies can also substantially alter a person's immune response.

A new wide-ranging survey conducted by Carnegie Mellon Psychologist Sheldon Cohen and Washington University Psychologist Gregory Miller looked at the results of studies of 2,135 people participating in 59 separate programs in stress management, relaxation techniques and hypnosis, among other therapies. Cohen and Miller found only scattered evidence that psychological interventions influence the human body's immune response to illness.

However, they caution that many of these intervention studies suffered from methodological limitations. They also point out that several well-designed studies show that psychological intervention can cause changes in a patient's immune system. New trials focusing specifically on whether psychological interventions improve a patient's ability to recover from mild to serious illnesses will provide a better sense of what works.

Their review was published in Health Psychology.