ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, November 5, 1996 TAG: 9611050055
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ORLANDO, FLA.
SOURCE: DELTHIA RICKS KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
If you could bottle a belly laugh or compress a good guffaw into a pill, the result would be a superdrug capable of treating everything from a bout with the blues to heart disease and cancer.
Laughing, researchers say, is hearty medicine that boosts the immune system and triggers a flood of pleasure-inducing neurochemicals in the brain.
Two California scientists who study the mysteries of mirth and the medical benefits of chortling, giggling and being overcome by a hoot say humor has health-enhancing properties, some of which have yet to be explored.
``If we took what we now know about laughter and bottled it,'' said Dr. Lee Berk, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Loma Linda University, ``it would require FDA approval.''
Pioneering studies by Berk and Dr. Stanley Tan, also of Loma Linda, have shown that laughing lowers blood pressure, increases muscle flexion and triggers a flood of beta endorphins, the brain's natural morphinelike compounds that can induce a sense of euphoria.
Laughter's most profound effects, the researchers say, occur on the immune system.
Natural killer cells that destroy viruses and tumors increase during a state of mirth. Gamma-interferon, a disease-fighting protein, rises with laughter as do B-cells, which produce disease-destroying antibodies, and T-cells, which orchestrate the immune response.
Berk and Tan presented their data Sunday at the sixth annual meeting of the American Association for Therapeutic Humor in Orlando. The association is a group of physicians, psychotherapists and other health care specialists trying to inject humor into day-to-day medical care.
Tan, an expert on laughter's effects on the nervous and endocrine systems, says humor provides a safety valve that shuts off the flow of stress hormones, the fight-or-flight compounds that come into play during times of stress, hostility and rage.
Recent ``rage'' studies at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and Yale University in Connecticut are the flip side of the Berk and Tan work.
People who are typically hostile and prone to anger are more likely to suffer heart attacks and sudden death than their chuckling, laid-back counterparts. The reason? Stress hormones, which include adrenaline, bombard the hearts of hostile people, forcing the organ to beat as if in a constant state of fight or flight.
Stress hormones also suppress the immune system, raise blood pressure and increase the number of sticky cells called platelets that can cause fatal obstructions in arteries.
So health dividends are multiplied, say Tan and Berk, for those who indulge regularly in big ol' belly laughs.
Drs. Sol Klotz and Susan Hunter, Winter Park, Fla., immunologists, agree. They are working with psychologists at the University of Central Florida on a study examining the immunological effects of humor for people with cancer and AIDS.
Preliminary results show that immunoglobulin-A, or IGA, a key immune component secreted from the eyes, in saliva and mucous membranes, becomes profuse when patients are exposed to something funny. IGA's profusion is a sign that the immune system responds quickly to humor, Klotz said.
``There's more and more interest in humor as medicine,'' said Dr. Edward Dunkelblau, president of the therapeutic humor association. An Illinois psychotherapist, Dunkelblau regularly uses humor to treat patients with a variety of mental conditions, encouraging his patients to laugh.
Medicinal humor, Dunkelblau added, is ``inexpensive and has no negative side effects.''
In fact, ``it's fun to laugh,'' he said.
Indeed, at a conference that could have been dominated by charts and graphs, the association practiced what it preaches.
Big-footed, red-nosed ``therapeutic clowns,'' some wearing fright-wigs and at least one with synthetic lavender hair, roamed the sessions, bursting into laughter every now and then - sometimes for reasons known only to themselves.
The clowns were from Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, Fla., which has a clown college. Graduates patrol the hospital's halls, handing out joke books, smiling faces and baby clown dolls. These unusual hospital volunteers spend much of their workday chuckling and giggling.
Berk of Loma Linda summed up the benefits of laughter: ``Blessed are those who laugh, for they shall last.''
LENGTH: Medium: 82 linesby CNB