In recent years, scientists actively started to be interested in what role the immune system plays in the brain and other regions of the nervous system. Only over the past decade, neuroscientists and molecular biologists have discovered many hints that excessive activity of the immune system and associated inflammation can cause serious disorders in the brain, including multiple sclerosis or Alzheimer’s disease.
Vladimir Arkhipov, neuroscientist from the Institute of theoretical and experimental Biophysics RAS, Pushchino, and his colleagues tried to understand why nearly all people start to think badly and worse new memories in those moments of time when they have the flu or any other serious illness.
As the scientists explain, when the virus of influenza or other pathogens in the body starts an inflammatory reaction, transfer of the body in a kind of «state of emergency». At this time, immune cells are particularly aggressive to attack any suspicious objects, and allocate a large set of signaling molecules, changing the behavior of the other tissues of the body.
Some of them contributes to the development of inflammation, while others suppress them. At infringement of balance between these substances, the inflammation can turn into chronic stage and cause a lot of problems for the human body or animals.
It tells Arkhipov, recently his team have discovered by experimenting on rats that the molecules contributing to the development of inflammation, significantly impair intellectual abilities of rodents and prevent them remember new information. This discovery gave them the idea that the decrease in the number of anti-inflammatory substances secreted by the cells even in a healthy organism, may cause similar changes.
They tested this idea by observing how to change the behavior of rats, whose body they brought in large quantities of substances, to block the work of the molecules of the protein TGF-beta, a key inflammatory signals.
Storage rodent biologists checked, put them in a cage, whose floor was hit by their shock. As a rule, rats almost immediately remembered the place where they received discharges of electricity, and leave his side. They begin to move especially slowly in the surrounding area, checking each step.
When the scientists blocked TGF-beta, the care of rodents decreased significantly. Animals are much less likely to stop and started worse to remember the position of the electrified sections of the floor than their counterparts in the control group. Interestingly, this behavior continued even on the seventh day of the experiment, which indicates serious disturbances in the working memory of rats.
Similar to the results of experiments, according to Arkhipov and his colleagues, suggests that the immune system unexpectedly strongly affects memory and intelligence. Further study of these relationships will help understand how to protect the brain from such changes and to improve its functioning in old age or Alzheimer’s disease, conclude the authors.
https://chelorg.com/2018/04/03/scientists-from-russia-have-discovered-how-the-immune-system-affects-...
