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A neurosurgeon at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research on Long Island New York, Dr.Kevin Tracey, MD has disproved the long held theory that there is no connection between the brain and the immune system. His research shows that the brain communicates directly with the immune system and sends out commands that control the inflammatory response to an infection and several autoimmune diseases.
They are now conducting clinical trials to see if stimulating the vagus nerve, which is the longest of the cranial nerves, will result in being able to block a defective inflammatory response and if it does, possibly be able to find a way to treat a variety of diseases, including sepsis, in which the whole body has an inflammatory response to and infection and which can be life threatening.
The new knowledge that they have gained concerning the role of the vagus nerve in the regulation of inflammation, they feel that it will be possible to use the body's natural healing defenses and control sepsis before it spreads throughout the whole body. Sepsis is a very serious condition with a high mortality rate. Each year in the United States alone there are 750,000 cases of severe sepsis and of them, 215,000 will die in spite of all the efforts of the medical professionals.
Researchers are now studying different methods to alter the way the brain responds or targeting the immune system directly as a possible new way to control diseases.
Dr. Tracy' interest in finding a way to treat sepsis goes back more than 20 years to when he had a young girl as a patient whose body had been burned by scalding water and she developed sepsis, which took her life. Dr. Tracy turned to doing research to try and find the answers as to why the body has the ability to make cells that can kill.
In the new research, he found that the vagus nerve communicates directly to the immune system through a neurochemical - a chemical in the nervous system- called acetylcholine. He also found that by stimulating the vagus nerve they were able to send signals to the immune system that told it to stop pumping toxic inflammatory markers, thereby giving them the tools they need to be able to shut off abnormal responses from the immune system.
They are now conducting research to find out if they can tweak the brain's acetylcholine system as a way to control inflammatory response. Inflamation is the key component in many different types of diseases including autoimmune conditions like Crohn's and rheumatoid arthritis and forms of dementia such as Alzheimer's.
Source: North Shore-LIJ Health System, http://www.northshorelij.com/
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