Could infection make us less empathetic?

When a virus, bacteria or any other pathogen enters our body, we feel sick. Fever, fatigue, loss of appetite and muscle weakness are some of the most common symptoms we suffer from when we have a cold, flu or other illness caused by an infectious agent. Nevertheless, This set of clinical manifestations that make us feel like wimps is not caused by a pathogen; at least not directly. It is our own body that causes most of the general discomfort that makes us feel sick.

The immune system is responsible for these changes. When a body cell becomes infected with a pathogen, the immune system is activated to fight it. In this process cytokines are necessary, proteins produced by various agents of the immune system and used to transmit information. For example, they will alert the brain that we are under attack. It is this organ, occupying a privileged position as the body’s control center, that activates a number of mechanisms that facilitate the action of the immune system. Of course, as unfortunate collateral damage, we’ll feel depressed for a few days.

When your body makes you feel like you’ve been hit by a bus.

Thus, behind this feeling of depression lies a number of changes at the metabolic level, which, on the one hand, are aimed at optimizing the action of cells of the immune system. On the other side, They also strive to stop the pathogen from spreading in the body., and thereby make the task even easier for our defense system. Fever, for example, is beneficial for the functioning of many cells of the immune system, since their performance is increased by raising the body’s thermostat.

As for fatigue, this is due to the fact that the activated immune system requires a lot of energy. With a complete immune response About 30% of the body’s nutrients go to immune cells. This leaves some bread and water for other tissues that have a very high glucose requirement, such as skeletal muscle.causing us to feel weak, tired, and generally feel like we’ve just been hit by a bus.

What may seem paradoxical is that under these circumstances we are not very hungry. This is another consequence of the action of cytokines on the brain: loss of appetite, which may manifest itself as a simple loss of appetite or be accompanied by unpleasant nausea. Although it may seem counterproductive, this measure serves to provide the immune system with more nutrients. What happens is that this fasting causes our metabolism to change in favor of using triglycerides stored in fat tissue, increasing their availability in the bloodstream and allowing immune system cells to consume them.

Today I don’t go out, I stay at home because I don’t feel well, in addition to these changes at the metabolic level. Infections also affect our mood and behavior on a social level. When we are sick, we tend to stay home alone, with little desire to do anything, much less socialize. It is believed that this decrease in social activity may be an attempt by the body to conserve energy to use to fight the disease.

Over the years, it has been studied how the infectious process can influence various aspects of human behavior, but Its possible impact on one of our most human traits: empathy has not yet been explored.the ability to put yourself in others’ shoes and understand how they feel.

To determine whether infection can affect our ability to empathize, the research team proposed the following experiment. 52 healthy women aged 18 to 40 years were recruited and divided into two groups. One group was injected with a bacterial endotoxin called lipopolysaccharide to simulate an infection. The other group, the negative control, was not administered. Once the volunteers began to notice general discomfort typical of an infection (or not, in the case of the control group), They were asked to rate different images. In these photographs one could see women suffering from physical or psychological trauma or maintaining an emotionally neutral relationship with a man.

The researchers noticed that women who suffered from a feigned infection tended to empathize less to images showing psychological suffering. Interestingly, this did not seem to affect their empathy for photographs of women suffering from somatic pain.

This has led policymakers to conclude that suffering from infection can affect our interpersonal relationships, reducing our ability to empathize with the psychological distress of others when we are sick. The explanation they consider for this decline in empathy is as follows. possible energy savings devote more resources to fighting the disease instead of worrying about others.

No matter how interesting this work is, We must remember its limitations.. The first is that we cannot generalize their results. Although this study was well designed in that the selection criteria for volunteers were quite exhaustive (for example, women who smoked or took hormonal contraceptives were not included to try to exclude their influence on the results), this study is limited to young women and healthy women. Therefore, we cannot happily assume that other groups of the population, such as men over 60, will respond in the same way. Moreover, it is also unclear whether this lower empathy is limited to strangers or whether it can also be shown towards our loved ones.

In any case, this is an aspect of infectious processes that has not been studied until now and which opens up new and interesting possibilities for study. Could suffering from the catarrhal process, for example, influence whether we vote for a particular political party because we are less empathetic to the suffering of others? This and other questions remain to be answered in future research.

-Go to the “Third Millennium” add-on.

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