ABSTRACT
Over the years, a tremendous amount of anecdotal evidence has accumulated suggesting that stress can have an effect on immune responses. In the last decade, however, this anecdotal evidence has been supported by an increasing amount of experimental data. What we would like to do in this chapter then, is to describe some of the evidence indicating that stress can affect immunological responsiveness. First, we present brief models of the two major kinds of immune responses, and indicate what kinds of immunity they mediate. Then we suggest several ways in which stress could affect immune responses, and finally we describe what we feel are some of the more compelling studies documenting an effect of stress on the immune response.
