Impaired lymphocyte stimulation induced by long-term training.

In recent there has been increasing interest in the definition of hormone influence on the immune system. Physical stress provides a suitable model for studying the interactions between the immune system and the neuroendocrine factors which have been shown to modulate the lymphoid cellular compartment. Our approach has been devoted to defining the stable modifications induced in the immune system in athletes during agonistic training. The results show that the circulating compartment of the immune system tends to modulate its different subsets under the continuous influence of stress hormones, together with a specific functional impairment of the helper subset in the proliferative response after stimulation with PHA, and particularly with PWM.