April 13, 1999
Web posted at: 4:08 p.m. EDT (2008 GMT)

CHICAGO (CNN) -- In a report on a new study, researchers say people with chronic asthma or rheumatoid arthritis saw improvement in their symptoms for up to four months -- after writing a single essay about their illnesses.

Dr. Joshua Smyth of North Dakota State University was the lead author of the study, released on Tuesday ahead of its Wednesday publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Smyth tells CNN, "The take-home message in this study is that psychological factors have an impact on illness, and that at least this is one way of dealing with it."

Researchers assigned 112 patients with asthma or rheumatoid arthritis to one of two groups. Members of the first group were told to write an essay about the most stressful event of their lives. Those in the control group wrote about emotionally neutral topics.

Four months later, the patients who wrote about traumatic experiences had measurably better health status than those in the control group.

"These gains were beyond those attributable to the standard medical care that all participants were receiving," the authors write in their article.

Asthma patients in the experimental group showed an average 19-percent improvement in certain lung functions compared to the control group patients, who showed no change.

And arthritis patients who penned their more traumatic experiences showed an average drop in overall disease severity of 28 percent compared to the control-group patients.

The JAMA study appears to support what many psychologists and people with chronic illnesses believe, that emotional factors can have an impact on a patient's well-being.

Breast cancer survivor Musa Mayer wrote about the trials of her illness and now teaches others to put their pain into words.

"The simple act of putting it on paper, or on that (word processor) screen, what you feel at the most deep level, is healing in and of itself, I believe," Mayer tells CNN.

In the JAMA article, the study's authors write that they don't know "whether these health improvements will persist beyond four months or whether this exercise will prove effective with other diseases."

In an editorial published in the same edition of JAMA, Dr. David Speigel of Stanford University School of Medicine suggests it's important to combine psychological care with traditional medical care.

"Ventilation of negative emotion, even just to an unknown reader, seems to have helped these patients acknowledge, bear and put into perspective their distress," Speigel writes.