This work involved 26 patients suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. They sat in a lecture theatre for an hour, and listened to traditional Japanese comic stories ('rakugo'). Before and after this performance, the emotional state, degree of pain, and various aspects of their blood chemistry relevant to the disease were assessed. There was a control group of 31 healthy people.
The patients' mood improved, and their experience of pain diminished, after laughter. Moreover the patients' cortisol levels fell, suggesting a reduction in stress; and the levels of the signalling compounds interleukin-6 and interferon gamma also fell, corresponding to a reduction in the severity of the disease.
If you want to know what rakugo LOOKS like, the article has a picture of the performance taking place. In another letter, this Japanese research group reported very similar findings, with a slightly different experimental design, see below.
Three groups were compared. Two of these, namely healthy controls and a group of patients suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, were exposed to rakugo (see above) for one hour, and "mirthful laughter was induced by this method in all". The third group consisted of patients with the same disease, but who were not exposed to rakugo. The laughing patients showed "dramatically" reduced levels of interleukin-6 (this being a signalling compound whose levels correlate with disease activity) in the blood, compared to the non-laughing patients.
[ Books |Mailing Lists |Research |Websites ]