ArticlePLoS biology2015
Why Do We Feel Sick When Infected--Can Altruism Play a Role?
Article in PLoS biology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
42 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 89 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sickness and the Social Brain: Love in the Time of COVID.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2021Pooled it
- The theory of epidemics with altruism.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Association of Systemic Inflammation with Nocturnal Sleeping Time Among Terminally Ill Patients with Cancer: Preliminary Findings.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Immune challenge affects risk sensitivity and locomotion in mosquitofish (Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Associating with kin selects for disease resistance and against tolerance.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- How behavioural ageing affects infectious disease.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Trade-offs between immunity and competitive ability in fighting ant males.BMC ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Immune challenge affects reproductive behaviour in the guppy (Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Effects of physical activity in child and adolescent depression and anxiety: role of inflammatory cytokines and stress-related peptide hormones.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Review
- Bat behavioral immune responses in social contexts: current knowledge and future directions.Frontiers in immunology · 2023Review
- Discriminating between sick and healthy faces based on early sickness cues: an exploratory analysis of sex differences.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2023Article
- What SARS-CoV-2 does to our brains.Immunity · 2022Review
- The evolution of the human healthcare system and implications for understanding our responses to COVID-19.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2022Review
- Sick bats stay home alone: fruit bats practice social distancing when faced with an immunological challenge.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2021Article
- Peripheral viral challenge increases c-fos level in cerebral neurons.Metabolic brain disease · 2021Article
- Emerging roles for microglia and microbiota in the development of social circuits.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 2021Article
- Anti-pandemic lessons and altruistic behavior from major world religions at the time of COVID-19.Brain, behavior, and immunity · 2021Review
- The Sickness Behavior Inventory-Revised: Sickness behavior and its associations with depression and inflammation in patients with metastatic lung cancer.Palliative & supportive care · 2021Article
- Mobility and infectiousness in the spatial spread of an emerging fungal pathogen.The Journal of animal ecology · 2021Article
- Bidirectional interactions between host social behaviour and parasites arise through ecological and evolutionary processes.Parasitology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
When we contract an infection, we typically feel sick and behave accordingly. Symptoms of sickness behavior (SB) include anorexia, hypersomnia, depression, and reduced social interactions. SB affects species spanning from arthropods to vertebrates, is triggered nonspecifically by viruses, bacteria, and parasites, and is orchestrated by a complex network of cytokines and neuroendocrine pathways; clearly, it has been naturally selected. Nonetheless, SB seems evolutionarily costly: it promotes starvation and predation and reduces reproductive opportunities. How could SB persist? Former explanations focused on individual fitness, invoking improved resistance to pathogens. Could prevention of disease transmission, propagating in populations through kin selection, also contribute to SB?
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.