[Stress and Allergy]

Stress is one of the components in the complex interaction of environmental, genetic, physiological, psychological, behavioural and social factors that can influence the body's ability to remain healthy or become healthy, to resist or overcome a disease. Stress can alter neuroendocrine and immune mechanisms of health and disease through various psychosocial processes. In addition, it can affect health through the impact on health-impairing behaviours and on compliance with medical regimens. At the same time, the relationship between stress and health is not unidirectional but bi-directional. Current views on the relation between stress and allergy vary from the denial of any relationship that could fundamentally help in allergy treatment to the widespread opinion that psychological stress can exacerbate some skin symptoms and precipitate asthma. The role of stress in the genesis, incidence and symptomatology of allergy still remains a controversial issue since the mechanisms of that relationship are not well understood. Starting from the biopsychosocial model of disease, we introduced the Social Readjustment Rating Scale which measures stressful life events, and the WHOQOL-BREF which measures subjective quality of life, into an extensive multidisciplinary study of immunotoxic effects of indoor bioaerosols and lifestyle. This paper describes the characteristics of those two questionnaires and discusses the relationship between stress and various domains of the quality of life. The Social Readjustment Rating Scale proved to be a reliable predictor for quality of life in the domains of physical health and environment. Future analyses will examine the role of stress and subjective quality of life in allergy.