MIND : LAUGHTER REALLY BEST MEDICINE?

Byline: Delthia Ricks Orlando Sentinel

If you could bottle a belly laugh or press a good guffaw into a pill, the result would be a superdrug capable of treating everything from a bout with the blues to heart disease and cancer.

Laughing, researchers say, is hearty medicine that boosts the immune system and triggers a flood of pleasure-inducing chemicals in the brain.

Two California scientists who study the mysteries of mirth and the medical benefits of chortling, giggling and being overcome by a hoot say humor has health-enhancing properties, some of which have yet to be explored.

``If we took what we now know about laughter and bottled it,'' said Dr. Lee Berk, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Loma Linda University in California, ``it would require FDA approval.''

Pioneering studies by Berk and Dr. Stanley Tan, also of Loma Linda, have shown that laughing lowers blood pressure, increases muscle flexion and triggers a flood of beta endorphins, the brain's natural morphinelike compounds that can induce a sense of euphoria.

Laughter's most profound effects, the researchers say, occur on the immune system.

Natural killer cells that destroy viruses and tumors increase during a state of mirth. Gamma-interferon, a disease-fighting protein, rises with laughter as do B-cells, which produce disease-destroying antibodies, and T-cells, which orchestrate the immune response.

Berk and Tan presented their data at the sixth annual meeting of the American Association for Therapeutic Humor. The association is a group of physicians, psychotherapists and other health-care specialists trying to inject humor into day-to-day medical care.

Tan, an expert on laughter's effects on the nervous and endocrine systems, says humor provides a safety valve that shuts off the flow of stress hormones, the fight-or-flight compounds that come into play during times of stress, hostility and rage.

Recent ``rage'' studies at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and Yale University in Connecticut comprise the flip side to the Berk and Tan work.

People who are typically hostile and prone to anger are more likely to suffer heart attacks and sudden death than their chuckling, laid-back counterparts. The reason? Stress hormones, which include adrenaline, bombard the hearts of hostile people, forcing the organ to beat as if in a constant state of fight or flight.

Stress hormones also suppress the immune system, raise blood pressure and increase the number of sticky cells called platelets that can cause fatal obstructions in arteries.

So health dividends are multiplied, say Tan and Berk, for those who indulge regularly in big ol' belly laughs.