Could your smart phone help predict how vulnerable you are to catching a virus and getting sick? A new, preliminary study suggests that one day it could.
Do you ever wonder why some people get sick and others seem almost immune? Evidence going back decades has shown that people who are stressed or fatigued are more likely to catch a cold. Now a study finds that your performance on quick brain quizzes may help to predict how vulnerable you are to getting sick from a virus. NPR's Allison Aubrey reports.
AUBREY: It's also known that a lack of sleep and a lack of physical activity can make us vulnerable to infection, too. Now Professor Doraiswamy and colleagues have set out to determine whether changes in a person's cognitive performance, such as our ability to stay focused, problem solve and think quickly, may also signal vulnerability.
DORAISWAMY: We weren't able to explicitly quantify how many millions of particles of virus they were actually shedding from their body at each time point. AUBREY: And it turned out people who seesawed between good and bad performance were more likely to get sicker with more severe symptoms.DORAISWAMY: What we found was that the people who showed high variability also had greater shedding and greater severity of symptoms.
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