Updated:30/05/2022 17: 24h
Save
Being under acute stress makes us more sensitive to infections such as Covid-19 or the flu. A study published in the journal “Nature” shows that certain specific regions of the brain control the body’s cellular immune response when it is under acute stress and, in addition, is infected by the virus that causes Covid-19 or the flu
According to the data, acute stress causes neurons in this region, the paraventricular hypothalamus, to instantly fire a large-scale migration of white blood cells (immune cells or white blood cells) from the lymph nodes to the blood and bone marrow.
And this decreases the immune response against viruses such as Covid-19 and the flu, making the body less resistant to fighting infection and exposing it to a higher risk of complications and death.
This seminal discovery connecting the brain to the immune system provides a better understanding of how stress affects the body’s response to a virus, and why some people may be more susceptible to serious illness and poorer outcomes.
First, researchers from Filip Swirski’s team, Director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (USA) analyzed groups of relaxed and stressed mice and studied their immune systems.
Within minutes, the mice experiencing acute stress showed large changes in their immune systems compared to the group of relaxed mice. Specifically, stress induced a significant migration of the body’s immune cells from one place to another.
The researchers wanted to explain this phenomenon
Using sophisticated tools like the optogenetics and chemogeneticsfound that neurons in the paraventricular hypothalamus prompted immune cells to migrate from the lymph nodes to the blood and bone marrow.
Next, they looked at how the mice in the relaxed and stressed models compared when infected with the flu virus and the Covid-19 virus.
Thus they observed that the relaxed group mice they behaved better compared to the stressed group: they fought the infection better and got rid of the virus more easily.
See them
comments