shingles immunity and health functioning in the elderly tai chi chih as a behavioral treatment带状疱疹免疫功能和健康老年人太极拳池玉兰行为疗法.pdfVIP

Advance Access Publication 1 December 2004 eCAM 2004;1(3)223–232 doi:10.1093/ecam/neh048 Review Shingles Immunity and Health Functioning in the Elderly: Tai Chi Chih as a Behavioral Treatment 1 1 2 Michael Irwin , Jennifer Pike and Michael Oxman 1Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, University of California, Los Angeles, Neuropsychiatric Institute, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 2 Department of Medicine and Pathology, University of California, San Diego and the San Diego Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Diego, CA, USA. Both the incidence and severity of herpes zoster (HZ) or shingles increase markedly with increasing age in association with a decline in varicella zoster virus (VZV)-specific immunity. Considerable evidence shows that behavioral stressors, prevalent in older adults, correlate with impairments of cellular immunity. Moreover, the presence of depressive symptoms in older adults is associated with declines in VZV-responder cell frequency (VZV-RCF), an immunological marker of shingles risk. In this review, we discuss recent findings that administration of a relaxation response-based intervention, tai chi chih (TCC), results in improvements in health functioning and immunity to VZV in older adults as compared with a control group. TCC is a slow moving meditation consisting of 20 separate standardized movements which can be readily used in elderly and