Subjects were taught to suppress their immune responses using physical conditioning

The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that people can learn to modulate their immune responses a finding that has raised hopes for patients who have chronic inflammatory disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease. Credit: Thinkstock

Dutch celebrity daredevil Wim Hof has endured lengthy ice-water baths, hiked to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in shorts and made his mark inGuinness World Recordswith his ability to withstand cold.

Now he has made a mark on science as well. Researchers have used Hofs methods of mental and physical conditioning to train 12 volunteers to fend off inflammation.

The results, published today in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that people can learn to modulate their immune responses a finding that has raised hopes for patients who have chronic inflammatory disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease.

The results are only preliminary, warns study first author Matthijs Kox, who investigates immune responses at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Kox says that people with inflammatory disorders sometimes hear about his experiments and call to ask whether the training would enable them to reduce their medication. We simply do not yet know that, he says.

Still, the work stands out as an illustration of the interactions between the nervous system and the immune system, says Guiseppe Matarese, an immunologist at the University of Salerno in Italy, who was not involved with the study. This study is a nice way to show that link, he says. Orthodox neurobiologists and orthodox immunologists have been sceptical. They think the study of the interactions between the nervous and immune systems is a field in the shadows, he says.

Cold blooded In 2010, as a graduate student, Kox was exploring how the nervous system influences immune responses. That's when he first learned that Hof had said that he could regulate not only his own body temperature, but also his immune system. We thought, Alright, lets give him a chance, says Kox. But we thought it would be a negative result.

Kox, and his adviser, physician and study co-author Peter Pickkers, also at Radboud University Medical Center, invited Hof to their lab to investigate how he would react to their standard inflammation test. It involves exposure to a bacterial toxin, made byEscherichia coli, to induce temporary fever, headache and shivering.

To Koxs surprise, Hofs response to the toxin was milder than that of most people he had less severe flu-like symptoms, for example, and lower levels of inflammatory proteins in his blood.

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