STRESS-RELATED CHANGES IN IMMUNOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL VARIABLES INDUCED BY THE PREPARATION AND DEFENSE OF A PHD-THESIS

Results are reported from a field study on 47 healthy subjects prepari ng and defending a PhD-thesis in the Netherlands. Measurements before, about and after thesis defense are used to quantify the temporal effe cts of this perceived stressor on immunological and psychological vari ables. Moreover, multivariate analysis of variance for repeated measur ements was used to explore a potential causal relationship between cha nges in immune variables and changes in psychological variables. Signi ficant temporal effects were observed for the immunological variables, percentage CD4 cells (p = 0.037), the proliferative response to pokew eed mitogen (p = 0.040), concanavalin A 10 mu g/ml (p = 0.010) and con canavalin A 40 mu g/ml (p = 0.005) and the psychological variables, av erage subjective distress (p = 0.002), highest subjective distress (p = 0.000) and the coping strategy depressive reaction pattern (p = 0.02 ). No evidence was obtained for a causal relation between the immunolo gical and psychological variables.