Abstract:

Background: There is growing evidence indicating that allergy and immune function can be modified by classical conditioning techniques, stress and other psychological factors, but the neural mechanisms remain unclear.

Objective: The reported experiments examine the involvement of psychological factors on allergic immune response. Psychological intervention like mental health training called HILDESHEIM HEALTH TRAINING provides further evidence that the human organism might be able to react differentially with more or less allergic immune responses after "Feedforward-treatment" like changing internal stimuli such as cognition and emotion, self hypnotic imagination or classical conditioning of healthy reaction.

Methods: In a randomised study HILDESHEIM HEALTH TRAINING, which includes behaviour therapy, classical conditioning, hypnosis and neuro-linguistic-programming (nlp), was evaluated with psychological tests and skin prick tests as a read-out system.

Results: While the skin wheal reaction to histamine was clearly enhanced during the pollen flight season in allergic control individuals, it remained unchanged in pollen allergic individuals who received mental allergy therapy.

Conclusion: The skin reaction of birch pollen allergic patients towards histamine provocation was modulated. This suggests that the immune response can be influenced by psychological intervention such as HILDESHEIM HEALTH TRAINING.