Tag: touch

Categories : Mental HealthTags :

Does Touch Benefit Mental and Physical Health?

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While a hug or friendly pat can seem soothing, the question remains: can touch really help you feel better, and does it matter who it’s from or how they touch you? To explore these questions, researchers from the Social Brain Lab at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and the University Hospital Essen conducted a large-scale analysis of studies exploring touch interventions. Their results, published in Nature Human Behaviour, reveal that the benefits of touch may not depend on who – or even what – does the touching.

Though individual studies provide conflicting results, this large-scale analysis shows that touch substantially improves both physical and mental wellbeing, for example via reduction of pain, anxiety, depression, and stress in adults. But in fact, those with physical or mental health problems (and therefore most in need of support) benefit even more from touch than healthy adults. “This is especially relevant considering how often touch interventions are overlooked,” notes first author Julian Packheiser.

“A key question of our study is to leverage the hundreds of individual studies out there to identify what type of touch works best,” adds professor Christian Keysers, director of the Social Brain Lab. “What if you don’t have a friend or partner close by to hug you? Would touch from a stranger or even a machine also help? And how often? The study clearly shows that touch can indeed be optimised, but the most important factors are not necessarily those we suspect.”

Interestingly, the person touching you, how they touch you, and the duration of their touch doesn’t make a difference in terms of impact. A long-lasting massage by a therapist could therefore be just as effective as a quick hug offered by a friend. That is, until the frequency of the intervention is considered. The more often a touch intervention is offered, the greater the impact. A quick hug could therefore be even more impactful than a massage if it is offered more frequently.

Human or non-human touch?

The next question was whether touch intervention needs to be human at all. As it turns out, object or robot interventions can be equally effective at improving physical wellbeing. “There are lots of people in need of wellbeing improvements, perhaps because they’re lonely but also because they may be inflicted by clinical conditions. These results indicate that a touch-robot, or even a simple weighted blanket has the potential to help those people,” last author Frédéric Michon explains. However, the benefits of robot and object interventions are less effective for mental wellbeing. Mental health disorders like anxiety or depression might therefore require human touch after all, “perhaps suggestive of the importance for an emotional component associated with the touch,” Michon points out.

While the researchers were equally curious about human-to-animal contact, studies exploring this question are still lacking. “It would be useful to see whether an animal’s or pet’s touch could improve wellbeing, and inversely if they also benefit from it, but unfortunately there simply aren’t enough studies, or properly controlled ones, for us to draw any general conclusions on these topics,” Michon clarifies.

Touch interventions across ages

When the team looked into the impact of touch on newborns, they found out that newborns also benefited significantly from touch. However, the person conducting the touch intervention was more important: the benefits of touch are higher when done by a parent instead of a healthcare worker. “This finding could be impactful,” Packheiser adds. “Death rates due to premature births are high in some countries and the knowledge that a baby benefits more from the touch of their own parent offers another easily implementable form of support for the baby’s health.”

Due to a lack of studies, it proved difficult to draw conclusions about children and teenagers. “Large scale studies like this help us draw more general conclusions but they also help us identify where research is lacking,” Michon explains. “We hope that our findings can steer future research to explore lesser-known questions. This includes animal touch, but also touch across ages, and in specific clinical settings like autistic patients, another category that has not been explored extensively.”

Source: Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience – KNAW

Categories : DermatologyTags : Leave a comment

Study Reveals a Touchy Secret in Hair Follicles

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Photo by Tobias Aeppli

Imperial researchers have discovered a hidden mechanism within hair follicles that allows the sensation of touch. Previously, touch was thought to be detected only by nerve endings present within the skin and surrounding hair follicles. This new research from Imperial College London has found that that cells within hair follicles (the structures surrounding the hair fibre) are also able to detect the sensation in cell cultures.

The researchers also found that these hair follicle cells release the neurotransmitters histamine and serotonin in response to touch. These findings, published in Science Advances, might help us in future to understand histamine’s role in inflammatory skin diseases like atopic dermatitis.

Lead author of the paper Dr Claire Higgins, from Imperial’s Department of Bioengineering, said: “This is a surprising finding as we don’t yet know why hair follicle cells have this role in processing light touch. Since the follicle contains many sensory nerve endings, we now want to determine if the hair follicle is activating specific types of sensory nerves for an unknown but unique mechanism.”

A touchy subject

We feel touch using several mechanisms: sensory nerve endings in the skin detect touch and send signals to the brain; richly innervated hair follicles detect the movement of hair fibres; and sensory nerves known as C-LTMRs, that are only found in hairy skin, process emotional, or ‘feel-good’ touch.

Now, researchers may have uncovered a new process in hair follicles. To carry out the study, the researchers analysed single cell RNA sequencing data of human skin and hair follicles and found that hair follicle cells contained a higher percentage of touch-sensitive receptors than equivalent cells in the skin.

They established co-cultures of human hair follicle cells and sensory nerves, then mechanically stimulated the hair follicle cells, finding that this led to activation of the adjacent sensory nerves.

They then decided to investigate how the hair follicle cells signalled to the sensory nerves. They adapted a technique known as fast scan cyclic voltammetry to analyse cells in culture and found that the hair follicle cells were releasing the neurotransmitters serotonin and histamine in response to touch.

When they blocked the receptor for these neurotransmitters on the sensory neurons, the neurons no longer responded to the hair follicle cell stimulation. Similarly, when they blocked synaptic vesicle production by hair follicle cells, they were no longer able to signal to the sensory nerves.

They therefore concluded that in response to touch, hair follicle cells release that activate nearby sensory neurons.

The researchers also conducted the same experiments with cells from the skin instead of the hair follicle. The cells responded to light touch by releasing histamine, but they didn’t release serotonin.

Dr Higgins said: “This is interesting as histamine in the skin contributes to inflammatory skin conditions such as eczema, and it has always been presumed that immune cells release all the histamine. Our work uncovers a new role for skin cells in the release of histamine, with potential applications for eczema research.”

The researchers note that the research was performed in vitro, and will need to be replicated in vivo The researchers also want to determine if the hair follicle is activating specific types of sensory nerves. Since C-LTMRs are only present within hairy skin, they are interested to see if the hair follicle has a unique mechanism to signal to these nerves that we have yet to uncover.

Source: Imperial College London

Categories : PaediatricsTags : Leave a comment

Mothers’ Touch Synchronises Brainwaves and Heart With Babies

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Photo by William Fortunato on Pexels

A new study found that when mothers had close physical contact and played with their babies, their brain activity and heart rhythms synchronised.

Touch is fundamental to interpersonal communication, and was not until recently it was not known how affectionate touch and physical contact affect the brain activity and heart rhythms of mothers and babies. Developmental psychologists Trinh Nguyen and Stefanie Höhl from the University of Vienna have investigated this question in a study published in NeuroImage. 

Affectionate touch and bodily contact create social connections and can reduce stress. This effect has been observed in romantic couples, linked to a mutual alignment of brain activity and heart rhythms.  Since touch is a fundamental mode of communication between caregiver and infant, Trinh Nguyen, Stefanie Höhl and US colleagues sought to find out whether proximity and touch also contribute to the attunement of brain and heart rhythms between mother and baby.

In the new study, four to six-month-old babies played and watched videos together with their mothers. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to measure brain activity while electrocardiography (ECG) was used to simultaneously assess the heart rhythms of mother and baby. With fNIRS, changes in oxygen saturation are recorded in the outermost layer of the brain – here in particular in the frontal brain. Activation in this region is associated with mutual emotional attunement, attentiveness and self-regulation. These processes are particularly relevant for social interactions and develop during the first years.

The results showed that mother-baby pairs mutually adjusted their brain activity, especially when they touched each other. Mutual neural adjustment occurred when the mother held the baby close to her body and both watched a video together, and when they played together face-to-face and the mother lovingly touched the baby. The new study shows that touch plays a fundamental role in the early adaptation of brain activity between mothers and infants. An adaptation of heart rhythms was also shown when mother and baby played together, but it was independent of touch. In the case of the heartbeat, a mutual adaptation was particularly evident when babies signalled discomfort, which was presumably transmitted to the mothers.

The researchers next want to investigate how this mutual attunement in brain activity and heart rhythms affects long term development, particularly the later relationship between mother and child, as well as children’s language development.

Source: University of Vienna