Inflammation

Posted on A to Z of Medical Conditions, Infectious Diseases

Vagus nerve stimulation – an electric pill for inflammation?

aVNS


Individualised auricular vagus nerve stimulation at the right time and with the right strength. CREDIT TU Wien

A system out of balance

When a virus – such as SARS-CoV-2 – triggers an inflammatory response in the body, this information is transmitted to the brain via the sensory nervous system. The Vagus nerve, which extends from the brain to most organs in the human body, responds in a regulatory way with an anti-inflammatory reflex. However, if the anti-inflammatory response is too weak, an excessive inflammation may negatively affect the body’s own regeneration. To restore the balance between the initially protective inflammatory response and the regenerative processes, aVNS systems can be used.

To test their hypothesis that aVNS also supports the healing process in severe Covid-19 cases, TU researchers worked closely with the Hospital Favoriten, the Medical University of Vienna, the Health Service Centre of the Vienna Private Clinic, the Sigmund Freud Private University Vienna and the Immunological Day Clinic Vienna.

aVNS in severe Corona courses

In its most recent study, the research team was able to show that the positive effect that Vagus nerve stimulation has on the course of severe Corona diseases, which was already predicted in 2020 – at the beginning of the pandemic – actually exists. For this purpose, the team investigated the use of aVNS on patients who were acutely ill with Corona and were about to receive artificial respiration.

When the virus attacks the body, the inflammatory response and healing process can become unbalanced. The inflammatory response of the body then causes more damage than the virus itself. This balance must be restored – for example, by using an aVNS system. “The electrostimulation of the auricular vagus nerve was not only able to stop the inflammatory reaction in Covid-19 patients, it was even able to counteract it,” Eugenijus Kaniusas, professor at the Institute for Biomedical Electronics at TU Wien, emphasises the result.

Stimulating at the exact right time

The therapeutic success of aVNS also increases by adapting the system. If an aVNS system constantly sends electrical impulses, this can lead to side effects such as pain. The power consumption is also significantly higher compared to when the system reacts individually to the patient and sends targeted stimuli. To realise this, the researchers around PhD student Babak Dabiri have integrated a closed-loop control. Eugenijus Kaniusas explains: “This allows us to stimulate the Vagus nerve exactly when the brain is listening. This is the case when the heart is contracting and blood is flowing into the vessels or when the person is exhaling.” In this way, over- and under-stimulation can be prevented, which often results from persistent aVNS.

While simple measurements refer exclusively to the past, Kaniusas and his team worked with predictions: “In the study, we were able to show that predictive stimulation works and leads to the desired result. This was possible due to a feedback function of the system, via which the aVNS system can constructively interfere with the parasympathetic system,” the electrical engineer Kaniusas says. “The aVNS system listens to the measured biosignals and sends its stimulus at exactly the right time, like an intelligent electric pill,” he finally draws a comparison. This is an important step in the direction of personalisation, through which the research team also expects better therapeutic success and more acceptance by users.

Posted on Vitamins

Down on Vitamin D? It could be the cause of chronic inflammation

Sunset


There’s a direct link between low levels of vitamin D and high levels of inflammation. CREDIT Rebecca Wood

Inflammation is an essential part of the body’s healing process. But when it persists, it can contribute to a wide range of complex diseases including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and autoimmune diseases.

Now, world-first genetic research from the University of South Australia shows a direct link between low levels of vitamin D and high levels of inflammation, providing an important biomarker to identify people at higher risk of or severity of chronic illnesses with an inflammatory component.

The study examined the genetic data of 294 ,970 participants in the UK Biobank, using Mendelian randomization to show the association between vitamin D and C-reactive protein levels, an indicator of inflammation.

Lead researcher, UniSA’s Dr Ang Zhou, says the findings suggest that boosting vitamin D in people with a deficiency may reduce chronic inflammation.

“Inflammation is your body’s way of protecting your tissues if you’ve been injured or have an infection,” Dr Zhou says.

“High levels of C-reactive protein are generated by the liver in response to inflammation, so when your body is experiencing chronic inflammation, it also shows higher levels of C-reactive protein.

“This study examined vitamin D and C-reactive proteins and found a one-way relationship between low levels of vitamin D and high levels of C-reactive protein, expressed as inflammation.

“Boosting vitamin D in people with deficiencies may reduce chronic inflammation, helping them avoid a number of related diseases.”

Supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council and published in the International Journal of Epidemiology the study also raises the possibility that having adequate vitamin D concentrations may mitigate complications arising from obesity and reduce the risk or severity of chronic illnesses with an inflammatory component, such as CVDs, diabetes, and autoimmune diseases.

Senior investigator and Director of UniSA’s Australian Centre for Precision Health, Professor Elina Hyppönen, says these results are important and provide an explanation for some of the controversies in reported associations with vitamin D.

“We have repeatedly seen evidence for health benefits for increasing vitamin D concentrations in individuals with very low levels, while for others, there appears to be little to no benefit.” Prof Hyppönen says. 

“These findings highlight the importance of avoiding clinical vitamin D deficiency, and provide further evidence for the wide-ranging effects of hormonal vitamin D.”

Posted on Diet

Top 18 ANTI-INFLAMMATORY Foods | WHAT TO EAT To Reduce Inflammation

Top 18 ANTI-INFLAMMATORY Foods | WHAT TO EAT To Reduce Inflammation - YouTube


Did you know you can fight inflammation simply through the foods you eat? To feel better and know that you are doing the best for your health, in this video, I’m going to share the Top Anti-Inflammatory Foods to help you reduce inflammation and get to feeling better.


Posted on autoimmune conditions, Rheumatoid arthritis

Nerve stimulation promotes the resolution of inflammation

5 Easy Ways to STIMULATE THE VAGUS NERVE - YouTube

The nervous system is known to communicate with the immune system and regulate inflammation in the body. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden now show how the electrical activation of a specific nerve can promote healing in acute inflammation. The finding, which is published in the journal PNAS, opens new ways to accelerate the resolution of inflammation.

The way the body regulates inflammation is only partly understood. Previous research by Peder Olofsson’s group at Karolinska Institutet and other research groups has shown that electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve can reduce inflammation. Such nerve stimulation has been used with encouraging results in clinical studies of patients with inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis. However, how nerve signals regulate the active resolution of inflammation was unclear.

“We have now studied the effects of signals between nerves and immune cells at the molecular level,” says April S. Caravaca, a researcher in Peder Olofsson’s group at the Department of Medicine, Solna, Karolinska Institutet and the Stockholm Center for Bioelectronic Medicine at MedTechLabs. “A better understanding of these mechanisms will allow for more precise applications that harness the nervous system to regulate inflammation.”


The researchers showed that electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve in inflammation shifts the balance between inflammatory and specialised anti-inflammatory molecules, which promotes healing.

“Inflammation and its resolution play a key role in a wide range of common diseases, including autoimmune diseases and cardiovascular diseases,” says Peder Olofsson. “Our findings provide insights on how the nervous system can accelerate the resolution of inflammation by activating defined signalling pathways.”

The researchers will continue to study how nerves regulate the healing of inflammation in more detail.

“The vagus nerve is only one of many nerves that regulate the immune system. We will continue to map the networks of nerves that regulate inflammation at the molecular level and study how these signals are involved in disease development,” says Dr Olofsson. “We hope that this research will provide a better understanding of how pathological inflammation can resolve, and contribute to more effective treatments of the many inflammatory diseases, such as atherosclerosis and rheumatism.”

Posted on Lupus, Rheumatoid arthritis

Researchers develop a tool for studying inflammatory diseases related to COVID-19

Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology Researchers Develop a Tool for Studying Inflammatory Diseases Related to COVID-19

A new bioinformatics pipeline helps investigate the mechanism underlying the development of autoimmune diseases following SARS-CoV-2 infection CREDIT
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST)

The SARS-CoV-2, or the novel coronavirus, has affected more than 500 million people worldwide. Apart from the symptoms associated with COVID-19 infection, it has recently been reported that the virus also leads to the subsequent development of autoimmune diseases in patients.

Autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, or multi-inflammatory syndromes arise when the immune system confuses healthy cells with pathogens and starts attacking them. But, the precise mechanism underlying this “breach of self-tolerance” is unknown. One of the possible mechanisms suggested to be involved is what is called “molecular mimicry,”
in which an autoimmune reaction is triggered when a T-cell receptor or an antibody produced from a B-cell directed against a specific antigen (foreign body) binds with an autoantigen, which is an antigen produced from our own body. This occurs due to a molecular or structural resemblance between the “epitopes” (the part of antigen attached to the antibody) of the antigens. However, a comprehensive investigation of the role of molecular mimicry in the development of such autoimmune diseases has not yet been performed due to the complexity of the epitope search and the lack of standardized tools.

To this end, a team of researchers from the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) led by Prof. Jihwan Park developed a new bioinformatics pipeline. Their new tool, called cross-reactive-epitope-search-using-structural-properties-of-proteins (CRESSP), was recently reported in the journal Briefings in Bioinformatics. “Previous studies on molecular mimicry used bioinformatics pipelines different from one another that often involved complex algorithms and were not scalable to proteome scales. In light of this, we developed a pipeline that is easily accessible and scalable,” explains Prof. Park. “It uses the structural properties of proteins to identify epitope similarities between two proteins of interest, such as human and SARS-CoV-2 proteins.”

Using CRESSP, the team screened 4,911,245 proteins from 196,352 SARS-CoV-2 genomes obtained from an open-access database. The pipeline narrowed down 133 cross-reactive B-cell and 648 CD8+ T-cell epitopes that could be responsible for COVID-related autoimmune diseases. It further identified a protein target, PARP14, to be a potential initiator of epitope spreading between COVID-19 virus and human lung proteins.

The pipeline also predicted the cross-reactive epitopes of different coronavirus spike proteins. Moreover, the team developed an interactive web application to enable an interactive visualization of the molecular mimicry map of SARS-CoV-2. The pipeline is also available as an open-source package.

The team hopes their new tool will facilitate comparison between studies, providing a robust framework for further investigation on molecular mimicry and autoimmune diseases. “Although autoimmune diseases affect less than 10% of the population, studying them is important since it severely impacts the quality of life. Our new tool can be used to study the possible involvement of molecular mimicry in the development of other autoimmune conditions in a systemic and scalable manner,” concludes Prof Park.

Hopefully, the new invention will help us deal with SARS-CoV-2 and other viral infections better.