

Gracie News

Bullying Damages Your Immune System

April 13, 2012

We are aware of the harmful effects bullying has on your feelings, but what is not so evident is how it effects your immune system. Researchers from Duke University in North Carolina have actually proven that bullying weakens the immune system. This, in turn, can increase illness in children that are being bullied or create an unhealthy stressful job environment if bullying is happening in the workplace.

Bullying can result in the immune system suffering, says a new study on monkeys.

Lead author Jenny Tung from Duke University in North Carolina studied rhesus macaques and found that when one was introduced to a new group, which results in it having the lowest status, it became stressed and its immune system dropped in efficiency.

The team believe that the social stress that moulds a monkey's immune system could help researchers understand how stress affects humans.

Tung and her colleagues studied 10 groups of female macaques in which researchers could manipulate individuals' social rank.


'In the wild, macaques inherit their social rank from their mothers,' Tung said. 'But in our research, the order of introduction determines rank. The newcomer is generally lower status. When some macaques' status changed after a newcomer arrived, so did their patterns of immune system gene activity.'


Based on the pattern of gene activity, the researchers could, without looking at a monkey's identity, predict whether that animal was high (rank one or two), middle or low (rank four or five) with 80 per cent accuracy.



Here, social rank post-shift could be predicted to 86 per cent accuracy (six out of seven).

'There's a concerning side to this kind of research, in that an individual's social environment probably partially determines health status,' Tung said.

Her colleague Dr Mark Wilson added: 'But there's also a hopeful side. For the seven females that changed ranks, their gene status changed with them.


Find a Certified Training Center near you and boost your child's immune system with Gracie Bullyproof.