Laughter's Nothing to Sneeze At

Japanese study shows watching Charlie Chaplin classic eases allergies. While there's no doubt Charlie Chaplin set out to make his audience laugh when he created his 1936 masterpiece "Modern Times," you can bet he had no idea his film might also ease allergies. But that's exactly what happened with a group of allergic Japanese men and women who laughed their way through the classic comedy, a research letter says. "It's very clear that laughter has an impact on body chemistry, the question is what kind of chemicals," says Steven Sultanoff, a psychologist and past president of the American Association for Therapeutic Humor. "Research into laughter shows that certain antibodies called IgA, which fight upper respiratory disease, are increased with laughter. Also, killer T-cells are increased while serum cortisol -- the hormone that causes the fight-or-flight response in reaction to stress -- is reduced by laughter." And now the Japanese study shows laughter may have an impact on allergies. Dr. Hajime Kimata, an allergist at Unitika Central Hospital in Uji-City, Japan, had 26 patients with atopic dermatitis, an allergic inflammation of the skin, watch the Chaplin classic.

The patients, 15 women and 11 men, were allergic to house dust mites and took no medication 72 hours before watching the film. After watching the movie, Kimata injected dust mite allergen into the skin of the patients to see if the movie had any effect on the size of their hives. He found a significant reduction in the size of their hives, an effect that lasted for two hours. There was no change in the size or the duration of their hives after the patients watched an 87-minute video featuring weather information. The research letter appears in today's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "There's more than psychology going on here, there is pyschoneuroimmunology," says Lee Berk, director of neuroimmunology at Loma Linda University's School of Medicine in California. "The allergic response is what we call the Th2 side of the immune system.

The Th2 side of the immune system produces cytokines, the hormones of the immune system. And what we've found over the years when we looked at mirthful laughter and classical stress hormones, that laughter lowers cortisol, which is the body's powerful steroid, which can shut down the immune system." "What's important here is when cortisol increases it shuts down the Th1 side of the immune system and allows the Th2 side to crank up," Berk explains. "And the Th2 side is responsible for producing IgE antibodies, which are the sign of an allergic response. But laughter down regulates cortisol, which turns on the Th1 side and suppresses the Th2 side. From a mechanistic standpoint, this study makes a lot of sense." "Modern Times' is one of Chaplin's masterpieces," says Frank Schiede, an associate professor at the University of Arkansas who is archiving lost film from Chaplin's career. "His films are universally accessible. Any language, any age can appreciate his humor." Laughter's impact on health has been a subject for research ever since Saturday Night Review editor Norman Cousins detailed how doses of "Candid Camera," the Marx Brothers and vitamin C were successful therapy for his ankylosing spondylitis, a severe connective tissue disease. His landmark 1976 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, which became the first chapter of his book, "Anatomy of an Illness," opened the medical establishment's eyes to the potential of the mind as a tool to treat illness. "I think it's a bigger issue than laughter," Sultanoff says. "It's humor which we are using as a part of treatment. Humor stimulates laughter, but humor also stimulates us to think differently.

Humor changes our cognitive patterns, and that thought process is directly related to health. There's been extensive research done on people who have a slightly unrealistic positive belief system that shows that they do best health wise." So would watching a sad movie hurt your health? "The answer is yes," Sultanoff says. "We have chemical reactions to everything, and studies have shown that those who are chronically depressed or chronically angry or chronically anxious, that those chronic emotions have a negative impact on our health."