Choir Singing Boosts Your Immune System

“When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because acapella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings--to stop being “me” for a little while and to become “us.” That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.”

So wrote the great and influential British musician-singer-producer-composer Brian Eno, clearly a big fan of choirs. As it turns out, singing in a choir has at least one other virtue of which Mr. Eno was unaware: It has the potential to improve treatment outcomes for people with cancer.

A new study out of the Tenovus Cancer Care Center in Cardiff, UK, found that choir singing for just 1 hour boosts the immune system. The research team took saliva samples from each participant just before and after a 1-hour choir session. The researchers used the samples to measure levels of hormones associated with stress-such as cortisol-as well as levels of cytokines, which are proteins associated with immune response.

Their findings showed that choir singing increased cytokine activity and caused significant reductions in cortisol levels across all participants after singing, which correlated with an improvement in mood and well-being.

The study's co-author, Dr. Ian Lewis, Director of Research and Policy at Tenovus, broke it down: "These are really exciting findings. We have been building a body of evidence over the past 6 years to show that singing in a choir can have a range of social, emotional and psychological benefits, and now we can see it has biological effects too... We've long heard anecdotal evidence that singing in a choir makes people feel good, but this is the first time it's been demonstrated that the immune system can be affected by singing."

Significantly, the team found that participants with the lowest levels of mental well-being and greatest levels of depression prior to singing experienced the greatest improvement in mood, which was associated with a lower pro-inflammatory response.

The study noted, "High levels of inflammation are associated with many mental health conditions, including depression."