Time-dependent sensitization in animals: a possible model of multiple chemical sensitivity in humans

It often happens in science that clues to the nature of a problem under study come from a completely different, seemingly unrelated, line of investigation. This may be the case with MCS and Time-Dependent Sensitization (TDS), a phenomenon we discovered in rats in the late 1970s and later named. TDS refers to the ability of mild stressors--whether pharmacological or environmental--to induce physiological and behavioral effects which then progress, i.e., get stronger, entirely as a function of the passage of time since stressor presentation. This strengthening is revealed when the organism is later exposed to either the original or another stressor. The characteristics of TDS bear a remarkable resemblance to the features of MCS and that similarity is the subject of this manuscript.