Health: Is Your Illness All in the Mind? ; There Is Growing Evidence That a Patient's Outlook on Life Can Affect Their Chances of Recovering from Disease. and Having Negative Thoughts Could Even Make You Sick. Roger Dobson Investigates

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Manuela Martinez and her colleagues were intrigued. Why was it that women who had suffered domestic violence seemed more prone to outbreaks of cold sores?

On the surface there appeared to be no connection between the physical and emotional abuse they suffered and the herpes infection that broke out on their lips. To try to find a link, they carried out a detailed profile of the saliva of a group of 74 survivors of abuse and compared it to a similar analysis of other women. They found that the abused women had far fewer immune-system compounds able to neutralise the virus. Their levels of antibodies to the virus were also lower. "Our findings confirm that the …