A study on Stress, Depression and NK Cytotoxic Potential in Women with Recurrent Spontaneous Abortion

It has been recognized that acute and chronic stress has an impact on the immunesystem. acute stress may have a stimulating effect on the immune system, while in the caseof chronic stress specially depression, the immune system could be down-regulated.however, an association between depression and a higher number of circulating white bloodcells with increased activity has been reported. elevation in immune cell numbers andalteration in cytokine profiles are documented for women suffering sporadic spontaneousabortion with a high stress score. in spite of these contradictory results and to make a newapproach in immunological (nk activity) as well as psychological parameters(stress/depression) in women suffering from recurrent spontaneous abortion (rsa) thepresent study was planned.forty-five women with a history of rsa and a matched control group were participatedin this study. a questionnaire for life events known as life change units (lcu) and the beckdepression inventory (bdi) outlines were used and the socio-psychological events wererecorded after visiting and interview. fresh peripheral blood lymphocytes were taken as asource of nk activity and k562 cell line were used as nk sensitive target. the experimentswere performed and the cells were analyzed with a flow-cytometer.the stress and the depression scores were determined 245±83.6 and 27.6±8.8 forwomen with rsa and 224±79.6 and 19.4±7.1 for non-rsa group respectively. there wasan association between life stress scores and depression scores with r=0.65 and p=0.000 forrsa women. a correlation with r = -0.34 and p = 0.02 was found between depressionscores and nk cytotoxicity. the pearson correlation test showed a lack of relationshipbetween high stress score and nk activity with the r=0.011 and p=0.95, but r= -0.30 andp=0.072 was obtained for high depression scores and nk cytotoxicity. therefore, it couldbe suggested that in the case of women with a history of recurrent spontaneous abortion,modulation for immunological parameters (i.e immunotherapy) concurrently with managingpsychological aspects (stress/depression) could be modified for the benefit of the patients.