Have you ever gone feeling so stressed, anxious and negative with all the things that are happening around that you end up getting sick eventually? New research explains the connection between your emotional health to your physical well-being.
The study, led by Jennifer Graham-Engeland, an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University, found out how negative emotions can alter the body's immune response against inflammation, illnesses, and diseases.
Graham-Engeland states in their paper, "Many nuances with regard to how affect and inflammation are related remain unexplored." She added, "To our knowledge, no one has examined the degree to which assessment methods or timing modify the association between affect and inflammation."
As a part of the larger Effects of Stress on Cognitive Ageing, Physiology, and Emotion or ESCAPE, researchers were able to dig deep into the study by inviting about 220 participants, according to Science Alert. Throughout the study, the team studied the participant's mood five times in two weeks.
To tally their emotional health, the researchers asked the participants to record and rate their emotions in their smartphones every time until the very day the research ended.
Aside from recording their emotions, the team extracted some blood sample from the participants to determine their inflammatory cytokine levels, which is an immunoregulatory molecule that controls and regulates the human immune system.
During the entire week, the team was unable to debunk the link between inflammation and negative/positive affect (emotions). But not until the end of the study where they were able to observe an association with the negative affect (emotions) and the participants' inflammatory cytokine level.
"Whereas aggregated momentary NA from week 1 was not associated with any biomarker, aggregated momentary NA from week 2 was significantly associated with higher levels of the 7-cytokine composite measure of inflammation, controlling for age, gender, BMI, education, health conditions, and statin use," researchers of the study exclaim.
The team further explains, through their study, they were able to link the relationship between negative emotions and inflammation markers of a person. This phenomenon inside the body could eventually make a person susceptible to infection, illnesses and chronic diseases.
The team is now looking forward to much deeper research when it comes to the connection of affect and inflammation, as posted by Medical News Today. Data gathered will soon be used to "promote novel psychosocial interventions," which could help the body fight chronic inflammation, disease, and disability.
