Researchers explore laughter’s effect on pain

Associated Press

Imagine a painkiller that could treat a variety of ailments, available without a prescription, whose only side effects are chuckles, giggles and maybe even guffaws.

The cost? At most, the price of a video.

UCLA researchers are hoping humor will prove to be a miracle pill in a study examining a tantalizing premise: What if something that makes you feel good can stop you from feeling bad?

They’re testing the theory in a pain lab at UCLA Medical Center, where healthy children are asked to submerge their hands in frigid ice water.

Watching videos ranging from clips of old Marx Brothers’ films to "The Simpsons" helps the youngsters endure the ice bath. The researchers hope it ultimately will help ease the pain of kids sick with cancer and other debilitating diseases, and maybe even help them heal.

Preliminary results indicate the kids watching funny videos were able to keep their hands in the ice bath 40 percent longer.

Some researchers believe humor works simply as a distraction. They point out that other studies have shown that other kinds of emotion — even sadness or disgust — have a similar effect.

Dr. Margaret Stuber, a UCLA psychiatry professor, calls that "a very legitimate question," but says there are suggestions that humor may be able to produce more long-term changes.

The notion that humor might actually produce healing-enhancing changes in the body is gaining respect among some scientists in a field called psychoneuroimmunology, which studies interactions between the brain and the body’s disease-fighting immune system.

Research has shown that stress can also inhibit the body’s immune system and make people prone to illness. Some studies also suggest that humor just might have the opposite effect.

A Japanese study published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that skin welts shrank in allergy patients who watched Charlie Chaplin’s comedic classic "Modern Times."

And Maryland researchers reported last year that people with healthy hearts were more likely to laugh in humorous situations than people with heart disease. Though the finding may simply suggest that having heart disease makes people feel less like laughing, the scientists think it also could mean that having a sense of humor somehow protects the heart.

In the UCLA study, the researchers are gauging the impact of humor on the physiologic responses to stress in 30 children, ages 8 to 18.

The scientists are examining changes in heart rate, blood pressure and levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the children’s saliva in response to watching the videos.

Stuber and colleague Dr. Lonnie Zeltzer, a pediatric pain specialist, hope to continue the research by studying sick children, with hopes that humor will alleviate their pain and perhaps even strengthen their immune systems. The result could mean smaller doses of narcotic pain medication, shorter hospital stays and better quality of life, Zeltzer said.

Children are ideal subjects because their biologic systems are still forming, she said. The experiment could thus act as a "biologic template" and permanently improve the way they respond to pain and disease, she said.

UCLA study: http://www.rxlaughter.org