Lina Hansson is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet, where she obtained her PhD in 2024. Her research focuses on inflammation-induced changes in human behavior, with a particular interest in social aspects of sickness. She examines how individuals express sickness to those around them and the factors influencing how a sick person chooses to approach or avoid others. Her work also explores how the social environment responds to sickness, including how people can detect that someone is sick.
Although a flu vaccine activated the immune system and raised cytokine levels in this randomised trial, participants didn’t feel substantially different from the placebo group. Vaccine models can help study subtle inflammation effects.
