'Life force' linked to body's ability to withst...(the biochemistry behind it. The team...),Health

The team gauged the magnitude of IL-6 associations for gender, race/ethnicity and personality by examining the degree to which each factor was associated with differences between people in IL-6. Of the differences in inflammation found in the patient sample in levels of IL-6, about 9 percent of the difference was due to gender, 6 percent was due to dispositional activity levels and another 4 percent to race/ethnicity. That a personality trait may contribute more to IL-6 levels than race/ethnicity was "a great surprise."

Along with Chapman and Jan Moynihan, Ph.D., director of the RCMBR, Ayesha Khan, Mary Harper, James Walton, Paul Duberstein, Nancy Talbot and Jeffrey Lyness assisted in the study.

Doug Stockman and Kevin Fiscella from the departments of Family Medicine and Community and Preventive Medicine at the Medical Center made important contributions as well. The work was supported by the General Clinical Research Center (GCRC) at the Medical Center and by the National Center for Research Resources, part of the National Institutes of Health.

While it may difficult for patients to change their nature, part of the solution may be physical exercise as a therapy. The activity component of extraversion has been linked with exercise by past studies, as has daily physical activity with lower IL-6 levels in the aging. Still, the team is not convinced that exercise represents the whole answer.

"Beyond physical activity, some people seem to have this innate energy separate from exercise that makes them intrinsically involved in life," Chapman said. "It will be fascinating to investigate how we can increase this disposition toward engagement. Potentially, you might apply techniques developed to treat depression like 'pleasurable event scheduling' to patients with low dispositional energy, where you get people more involved in life by filling their time with things they enjoy as a therapy."