While choosing the title to my last post, I was keenly aware
that at least a few people were probably hoping for a more interesting post
about actual sex, not just our biological gender.
Well, this one’s for you!
Psychologists at Wilkes
University Philadelphia BBC
article:
Admittedly, I haven’t done any
research beyond this one article, but I did find the results interesting. It makes sense that sex increases your
exposure to pathogens and thus antibody levels would increase. But what if there is another affect? It would be interesting to repeat this study
and compare monogamous couples with singles who have frequently new partners,
or partners who live together and share the same pathogens with those who
don’t.
I also think the comment on why students who reported having
sex 3+ times a week had lower IgA levels brings up an interesting point:
"My feeling is that the people in the very-frequent-sex
group may be in obsessive or poor relationships that are causing them a lot of
anxiety. We know that stress and anxiety
make IgA go down."
Obviously, this guy is trying to justify the odd results in
the 3+ group, and you certainly can’t assume that a relationship in which the
partners are having sex 3+ times a week is automatically “obsessive or
poor.” But this does present a rather
overwhelming subject matter – exactly how do our behaviors, attitudes,
emotions, and environment affect immunity?
And how can we concretely measure and understand those effects?
I think there are some issues with the article that stand out to me. The authors, or at least the referenced professionals, at the conclusion cite that it's very hard to compute increased IgA with cold resistance. Or possibly that there's another possibility, for example, the people who had sex 3+ times a week were in relationships or were polyamorous, which I think would be something they should/could have differentiated.
ReplyDeleteI think it's interesting to think of, if not amusing, the effects that sex does have on the immune system. What could be interesting too to study would be the effect of possible neurotransmitters released due to sex in the blood and how those could effect the immune system and its overall function.
This was an interesting article. I really would like to see the study design for data collection. I wonder how reliable the self report for number of sexual episodes per week is.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to the effects of environment, emotions and attitudes and subsequent effects on the immune system, there is a large body of knowledge available. One very notable reearcher if you are interested is Dr George P Chrousos. He has written a number of articles on the stress response and the associated immune and endocrine response.
It has been shown that dopamine is released during sex. Dopamine receptors exist on immune cells showing that dopamine has some regulatory affects on the immune system.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10636479
http://www.scitopics.com/Dopamine_and_immune_system.html
Interesting! I would really like to read about this more. I understand that there can be other factors that would lower IgA in those who are categorized in the "sex 3+more times/week" group , but wouldn't these factors also affect those who would only have intercourse twice a week? These factors shouldn't only be relevant to the different groups, right?
ReplyDeleteTran - I agree that factors that may be contributing to the lower IgA levels in the 3+ group would probably also be having at least some effect on the other sexually active groups as well. I feel the researcher was struggling to make sense of this result when he labeled the 3+ group as likely in "obsessive or poor" relationships.
ReplyDeleteI would love to see a similar study, perhaps evaluating more than just IgA, with more specific groups. For example, have the same scale of having sex 0, 1, 2, or 3+ times per week, but compare monogamous couples who live together, monogamous couple who don't live together, people with multiple partners, etc.