system, but some still change gene expression patterns in response to social stress (Antoni et al., 2006). One recent study of women with ovarian cancer found more than 220 genes to be selectively up-regulated in tumors from women with low levels of social support and high depressive symptoms (Lutgendorf et al., 2008). If our socially sensitive immune system is not conveying those effects, how do social influences reach into the damaged genome of a cancer cell? New insights have come from bioinformatic analyses of “social signal transduction.”
