Abstract
The excellent effect of fasting therapy for psychosomatic disease is already well known. Its effectiveness to allergic disease such as bronchial asthma gives us a suggestion that fasting therapy may have a certain influence in immunoactivity. On the other hand, starvation itself gives strong stress to human body, not only physically but also psychologically. For this reason, we may be able to regard "effect of fasting thrapy" as "effect of stress".In order to study the effect of fasting as therapy and as stress on immuoactivity, immunological factors were investigated in 29 cases with psychosomatic diseases and neuroses. All subjects were deprived of all food for 10 days and in an attempt to avoid dehydration the daily intake of normal drinking water was allowed without any limitation and were injected 500 ml of amino acid solution every day to protect the liver function during fasting period. Immunoglobulin, the number of total leucocytes, neutrophiles, lymphocytes and the ratio of T cell subsets in peripheral blood and serum cortisol were measured on the first and tenth day of the fasting period.By exposure of subjects to fasting, significant increases were obtained in the concentration of immunoglobulin (p<0.01) and serum cortisol (p<0.001). While there were sugnificant reductions in number of circulating total leucocytes (P<0.001), neutrophyles (p<0.001) and lymphocytes (p<0.01) at 10th day of fasting. The percentage of helper inducer T cells also fell significantly (p<0.01), but that of suppressor-cytotoxic T cells did not change, it seemed rather stable. It was found that there are significant negative correlations between the change of helper T cells and the changes of other immunological factors [total leucocytes count (p<0.01), cortisol (p<0.05)].These results indicate that the response of cortisol to the fasting play an important role in depression of immunoactivity. Fasting reduces the percentage of helper T cells and number of leucocytes in peripheral blood. But when helper T cells were reduced excessively, the number of leucocytes seems to be prevented from decreasing.It might be concluded that there is an autoregulatory mechanism in immune system, not to be depressed excessively by starvation stress.
