The Effect of Exercise on the Production of Typhoid Agglutinins *

The effects of exercise and of fatigue upon a variety of physiological responses in laboratory animals have been described by many authors, but few have extended the study to include the phenomenon of antibody responses in rabbits. An investigation of this question forms the basis of this note. That fatigue, or the attendant phenomena, decreases the susceptibility of the rat to subcutaneously injected tetanus toxin would appear from the work of Oppenheimer and Spaeth.2" This seemed to be especially marked when the period of exercise immediately preceded the toxin injection, while in the case of the guinea-pig receiving Type I pneumococcus resistance was increased by fatigue whether experienced before or after the bacterial injection (Nicholls and Spaeth20). On the other hand, Bailey3 states that acute fatigue diminishes the resistance of rabbits to the same pneumococcus given by the intratracheal route. Here, the effects were more marked when the fatigue followed the injection. Repeated forced fatigue, in the sense of training the rabbits, increased their resistance. In a later paper, Bailey4 reported that fatigue increases the primary reactions of rabbits to toxic bacterial antigens and thus favors antibody production. Other examples of discordant results are afforded by Boycott and Price-Jones,8 who stated that fatigue in rats was without influence on the death rate after injections of the G'artner bacillus, but led to a much higher rate when the organisms were given by the oral route. They also state that the resistance of rats to tuberculosis is not modified by fatigue. Lara and de Jesus"6 observed that fatigued guinea-pigs developed less typhoid agglutinin than did controls which were not exercised, and curiously enough, the influence of fatigue was more marked in female than in male animals. The few papers cited will serve to show that the effect of fatigue on antibody production and on immune mechanisms is such that a general statement is impossible. Additional papers bearing on the subject and on related fields are listed in the bibliography and need not be discussed here.