Abstract
It has been known for a long time that stress has an influence on the susceptibility to disease. As early as the nineteenth century, Louis Pasteur found that chickens could be made susceptible to anthrax by immersing their legs in cold water. In his 1936 paper published in Nature, Hans Selye included involvement of the thymus as one of the three criteria of the stress response, together with adrenal enlargement and gastric erosions. In the past few years a considerable body of data has been accumulated on the effects of environmental factors on the immune system functions, which substantiate these early findings.
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Mormède, P. (1990). Psychobiology of Stress and Immune Functions. In: Puglisi-Allegra, S., Oliverio, A. (eds) Psychobiology of Stress. NATO ASI Series, vol 54. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1990-7_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1990-7_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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