Health & Medicine - Posted by Ashley Yeager-Duke on Wednesday, April 11, 2012 9:51 - 9 Comments 
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Social drama can hurt health, monkeys show
"Our study supports the idea that low social status can be bad for the body. But it hints at the idea that if you improve your social situation, your health improves, too," says the study's lead author Jenny Tung. (Credit: grumpy monkey via Shutterstock)
DUKE (US) — The social status of a female monkey affects how her immune system genes turn on and off—and the higher her rank, the better her health.
Share this article
Email
Republish this article
The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
This holds true so long as the animal’s social status doesn’t decline, according to a study with rhesus macaques published in the April 9 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study is the first to use an experimental approach to observe how gene expression patterns across a range of genes correlate with an animal’s social dominance. It estimates that gene expression can predict the social status of an individual with 80 percent accuracy.
“Our study supports the idea that low social status can be bad for the body. But it hints at the idea that if you improve your social situation, your health improves, too,” says the study’s lead author Jenny Tung, a visiting assistant professor in Duke University‘s evolutionary anthropology department.
Past research has shown that caste-level and social status can change what genes get turned on and off in insects, fish, and honeybees. Scientists also have observed that the social environments of both humans and non-human primates affect their hormone levels and mortality risk, as well as the survival of their offspring.
Tung says scientists have more work to do to understand how improving social status affects the way genes turn on and off. But she found it “exciting” and “comforting” that her team observed positive changes in the expression of immune-system genes of several monkeys whose social rank increased, she says.
The team looked at gene regulation in 49 female rhesus macaques kept at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. The monkeys have a hierarchical rank based on the group in which they live. Males enter new social groups at adolescence to establish their rank order, while females never leave their birth group and take on a rank similar to their mothers’ status.
To test how gene expression would differ when a monkey’s rank changed, the scientists at Yerkes took the female macaques from their native groups and constructed 10 new social units, where rank was determined based on how early a female was added to her unit.
Tung and her collaborators then took blood samples from the monkeys and isolated the white blood cells. The results show that lower-ranking monkeys had lower levels of a certain kind of T cell and showed signs of exposure to chronic stress—two findings that helped explain why their genes turned on and off differently than high-ranking monkeys.
Her team also looked for changes in the monkeys’ DNA and found an animal’s rank in dominance correlated with the presence or absence of methyl groups, which help control the switching on and off of genes. The females’ immune systems responded rapidly when they moved from a lower social rank to a higher one, to the point where formerly low-ranking animals looked genetically like high-ranking ones.
“We’re seeing that there are a lot of effects of social status on genes, including our own, but we are also seeing that many of the changes aren’t permanent and that leads to more questions about how you regulate stress,” Tung says. This study is “just the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to understanding the relationship between genomics and social environments, she says.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
More news from Duke University: http://today.duke.edu/
Please wait
9 Comments
emac2
Bhadresh
Social status have effect on performance . Stress have effect on health. I have seen a person moving in a job from a marginal small company to higher status and reputed company, improves the moral and performance. Person upgrades to a higher level.
I have observed person diagonised with severe health problems have been to stressful environment . Mind have profond influence on humans and animals. Meditation helps to reduce stress and have peace in heart.
Harold A. Maio
Our study supports the idea that low social status can be bad for the body.
Are you referencing Dick Cheney’s status and insurance?
Susan
This is old news. Dr. Robert Sapolsky from Stanford has already “been there, done that”
June Carey
if you go back, again to Kramer’s book, “Listening to Prozac”, and read about the dominance studies, in relation to seratonin levels, and general sense of well-being, it all makes sense. I have 6 autoimmune diseases, and I can be well or ill,, depending on how well my seratonin levels are maitaining my sense of well-being. Just because the world went a bit crazy on Prozac doesn’t negate the fantasic breakthough this knowledge brought us.
I guess it is intuitive that moving down the social ladder, with the mental stresses this brings, can have an adverse effect on the immune system, health, and general wellbeing. But impoving health by moving up the social ladder? That is interesting!
June Carey
The idea that there is a ” social ladder ” is something our ” fair” society wants to believe we have worked our way beyond. It is a denial of reality of the modern race. People, social societies , any social animal, needs to be part of that group to survive, to not be isolated. We think a bunch of chickens in a pen who decide to pick on a weak /sick chicken are cruel and stupid, and primitive. And yet, in our own civilized way, we also find ways to literally destory those who don’t fall onto being a normal part of any group. One’s sense of well-being is inherently connected to being part of this group, as I see it. How can it be otherwise? People may form committees and legislate punishment for those who single out those who are ” different”, however, it seems the trend is to embrace the counter culture as a group and still rejcet the individual who fails in that group . I believe that is where the basic sense of well-being instinctlively comes into play in the immune system. But, what do I know…. I am not part of the ” group”!
Suzy Frame
Wow thanks for the article! It is crazy to think that our actions have such an effect on monkeys. I understand that we test almost everything on monkeys. I have even heard that we have been doing some sort of dental health on monkeys because they are so close to a human mouth. I became very interested in this and the human mouth. I found out that there is such thing as lingual braces for humans and it made me wonder if they really can do all that dental care on the monkeys? Does anyone know?
Suzy Frame
in reference: http://www.marorthodontics.ca
I think this is a better discussion about stress in humans then social status. That stress as the actual cause is clear and very likely to have the exact same effect in Humans. Making the secondary assumption that resetting social structures in caged animals will cause comparable stress reactions in humans is a much bigger jump. I would have titled and focused on the idea that stress causes the health issue and that relief of that stress and maybe even empowerment can improve health. I do appreciate that enough research was included in the article to draw my own conclusions!