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Tai Chi May Boost Shingles Immunity

Date: 9th December 2008, Source: National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Participation in the slow-motion martial arts program known as tai chi chih may help older people battle shingles.

In a recent study funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 36 people over age 60 either took 15 weeks of classes in tai chi chih (a highly structured version of tai chi designed with older people in mind) or were placed on a waiting list for those classes. Blood tests showed that those participating in the classes developed as much as 50 percent more of the kind of immune-system cell that fights shingles than they had going into the study. Those relegated to the waiting list showed no such change.

Shingles, or herpes zoster, is a painful skin disease that can develop in people who have had chickenpox. After the initial chickenpox illness, the varicella virus that causes it remains in the body, but the immune system usually keeps it from causing further illness.

Immune response to the varicella virus declines with age, though, so the virus that has lain dormant for years can re-emerge, causing shingles. There is no vaccine to prevent shingles; nor can the illness be cured, though symptoms generally recede over a few weeks or months.

Lead author Michael Irwin, a professor at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, says his study, published in the September issue of the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, is the first "that's looked at alternative medicine and how it impacts the immune system. It's also the first to look specifically at shingles immunity in an older population."

"There had been lots of anecdotal reports of the health benefits of tai chi, but no randomized trial," Irwin says. "We know exercise can boost aspects of the immune system, but viral immunity hadn't been studied."

Participants, says Irwin, "also saw improvements in everyday physical function, their abilities to do things like carry packages, walk, climb stairs," he says. "Those with the greatest impairments had the greatest gains."

Irwin notes that his study is too small to be conclusive.

Research presented in the September issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General has shaken the long-standing theory that differences among people's cognitive strengths -- from verbal skills to mathematical ability -- become smaller as they grow old.

The "de-differentiation hypothesis" holds that as people age, their relative strengths at individual cognitive skills tend to correlate more closely. So a person who had always been really good at math but less skilled at, say, writing, would in old age have a smaller gap between those two skills.

The hypothesis has existed for years, says Kaarin Anstey of the Australian National University, but until now it hasn't been rigorously examined among a randomly chosen sample of very old people.

Anstey and her colleagues studied cognitive-skill data collected for 1,823 people ages 70 to 84 over eight years. The study looked both at differences among individuals at a given time and at changes over time; Anstey says hers is the first study of de-differentiation to include both cross-sectional and longitudinal looks at the data.

Anstey says, "It is important to understand this phenomenon better because it has implications for understanding normal age-related decline in cognitive abilities. If everything becomes more highly correlated as people age, it would suggest that a common factor or factors underlie the aging of a range of abilities. . . . It would also imply that once one ability starts to decline, the other abilities would be likely to follow."

Instead, Anstey's research suggests just the opposite; her data show no evidence of such a "general merging of abilities" and hence, she says, no sign of an underlying, population-wide biological process that would lead to such overall decline.

"Just as people retain their individual personalities as they age, so they also retain their individual cognitive strengths and weaknesses," Anstey says.

 

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