Chinese exercise Tai chi found to offer immunity against shingles

Chinese exercise Tai chi found to offer immunity against shingles
LOS ANGELES: A traditional Chinese form of exercise that combines martial arts-like body movements and meditation, Tai chi, has been found to improve the immune systems in older people to fight varicella zoster virus that causes shingles, a new study funded by the National Institutes of Health in the United States had revealed.

Shingles is characterized by blistery rashes all over the body, often painful, and nearly one-third of all adults over the age of 60 are known to get infected with the disease.

The study, a randomized, controlled clinical trial, covered 112 healthy adults in the age group of 59-86. Each participant was put on a 16-week program of either Tai Chi or a health education program that provided 120 minutes of weekly instruction. While Tai Chi offered aerobic activity, relaxation and meditation, the health education program involved classes about a variety of health-related topics.

After the 16-week program, which also included blood tests at various stages to assess levels of immunity to the virus, people in both groups received a single injection of Varivax, a vaccine against chickenpox. Nine weeks later, blood tests were again carried out on the participants to determine the level of immunity, compared with the level of immunity at the start of the program.

Tai Chi alone was found to improve the participants' immunity to varicella as much as the vaccine typically produces in 30- to 40-year-old adults. Tai Chi combined with the vaccine was found to offer a significantly higher level of immunity, about a 40 per cent increase, over that produced by the vaccine alone.

The study also showed that the Tai Chi group's rate of improvement in immunity over the course of the study was double that of the health education group. The immunity levels of the two groups were similar when the study began.

In addition, the Tai Chi group also had significant improvements in physical functioning, bodily pain, vitality and mental health, while both the groups had shown significant declines in the severity of depressive symptoms.

The researchers say that the study confirms that a behavioral intervention like the exercise alone or in combination with a vaccine can lead to a positive, virus-specific immune response and help older adults against the infection.

The research was carried out by Michael Irwin and Richard Olmstead of the University of California at Los Angeles and Michael N. Oxman of the University of California at San Diego and San Diego Veterans Affairs Healthcare System. Besides NIH, its components, the National Institute of Aging and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine also supported the study.

Irwin, who has been the lead author of the study, said the findings are exciting because the positive results seen in this study can have implications for other infectious diseases, like influenza and pneumonia. "Since older adults often show blunted protective responses to vaccines, this study suggests that Tai chi is an approach that might complement and augment the efficacy of other vaccines, such as influenza," he added in a statement.

The details of the study are published in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

It has been found that one in five people who had chickenpox infection through his or her lifetime would get shingles after they cross the age of 50 as the chicken virus can remain dormant in the body and resurface as shingles years later.