(Press-News.org) COLUMBUS, Ohio – In a new study, researchers at The Center for Brain and Spinal Cord Repair at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center show that is possible to restore immune function in spinal injured mice.
People with spinal cord injury often are immune compromised, which makes them more susceptible to infections. Why these people become immune-suppressed is not known, but the Ohio State study found that a disorder called autonomic dysreflexia can cause immune suppression.
Autonomic dysreflexia is a potentially dangerous complication of high-level spinal cord injury characterized by exaggerated activation of spinal autonomic (sympathetic) reflexes.
This can cause an abrupt onset of excessively high blood pressure that can cause pulmonary embolism, stroke and in severe cases, death.
"Our research offers an explanation for why people with spinal cord injuries develop a condition referred to as 'central immune depression syndrome.' Their immune systems, which are required to fight off infection, are suppressed due to damage or malfunction in regions of the spinal cord that help control immune function," said principal investigator Phillip G. Popovich, Ph.D., Professor of Neuroscience in Ohio State's College of Medicine and Director of Ohio State's Center for Brain and Spinal Cord Repair.
The study is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Researchers found that autonomic dysreflexia develops spontaneously in spinal cord injured mice, and becomes more frequent as time passes from the initial spinal cord injury.
They also found that simple, everyday occurrences that activate normal spinal autonomic reflexes, such as having bowel movements or emptying the bladder, become hyperactive and suppress immune function in people with spinal cord injury.
In the study, Popovich and colleagues were able to restore immune function in mice with spinal cord injuries using drugs that inhibit norepinephrine and glucocorticoids, immune modulatory hormones that are produced during the onset and progression of AD. They also observed in a patient with a high-level spinal cord injury that briefly inducing autonomic dysreflexia impaired immune function, confirming that their findings in mice have relevance to humans.
"Although we don't know how to fix this yet, we also show that it is possible to restore immune function in spinal injured mice," Popovich said. "After spinal cord injury, the ability of the spinal cord to control the immune system is impaired. As result, these individuals become susceptible to infection, and often die from these infections. For those that survive, the infections can impair what little function they have left after the spinal cord injury."
The study found that autonomic dysreflexia causes immune suppression in part by releasing into blood and immune organs high levels of immune modulatory hormones that non-selectively kill mature and immature white blood cells in the spleen, said first author Yi Zhang, a post-doctoral neuroscience researcher at Ohio State.
"Our research is laying the groundwork for potential therapeutic targets for reversing central immune depression syndrome," Zhang said, adding that further research is needed.
###
Ohio State's Center for Brain and Spinal Cord Repair is an interdisciplinary collaboration of basic and clinical scientists working to promote recovery and repair and to discover new treatments for individuals who suffer from brain or spinal cord injuries.
Ohio State researchers involved in this study are Zhen Guan, Brenda Reader, Todd Shawler, Shweta Mandrekar-Colucci, Kun Huang, Zachary Weil, Anna Bratasz, Jonathan Wells, Nicole Powell, John Sheridan and Caroline Whitacre.
Other researchers involved in this study include Alexander Rabchevsky, University of Kentucky and Mark Nash, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R21 NS067260) and the Ray W. Poppleton Endowment.
END
More than 12 billion years ago a star exploded, ripping itself apart and blasting its remains outward in twin jets at nearly the speed of light. At its death it glowed so brightly that it outshone its entire galaxy by a million times. This brilliant flash traveled across space for 12.7 billion years to a planet that hadn't even existed at the time of the explosion - our Earth. By analyzing this light, astronomers learned about a galaxy that was otherwise too small, faint and far away for even the Hubble Space Telescope to see.
"This star lived at a very interesting time, ...
A new report from Simon Fraser University researcher Bohdan Nosyk calls for the expansion of heroin and opioid medical treatment to stem the increase of overdose deaths.
"Prescription opioid abuse and overdose is on the rise throughout North America," says the SFU Health Sciences associate professor and lead author of the study that was published in Health Affairs. "Opioid overdose is now the second-leading cause of accidental death in the U.S., behind only motor-vehicle accidents.
"People from all walks of life, including youths, are accessing these drugs and the ...
Alexandria, VA - Each year, as hurricanes hit U.S. coastlines, scientists study them to improve forecasts critical for saving lives and property. Last year, unmanned aircraft from NASA flew into the biggest storms as part of a project to improve hurricane forecasts by 50 percent over the next 10 years.
As EARTH Magazine reports in the August issue, three projects in particular — the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program, NASA's 2010 Genesis and Rapid Intensification Project Field Experiment and its replacement, the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel Project — may be ...
Frozen sperm taken by biopsy from testicles in men with no sperm in their semen is as effective as fresh sperm taken by biopsy in helping couples conceive through in vitro fertilization (IVF), according to a study at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
The researchers also determined that the type of facility where sperm is taken and its distance from the IVF laboratory has no bearing on pregnancy outcomes.
The findings, published online in PLOS ONE, may benefit men with no sperm in their semen due to genetics, cancer diagnoses or testicular failure. ...
New Johns Hopkins research suggests that people who undergo minimally invasive placement of stents to open clogged leg arteries are significantly less likely than those who have conventional bypass surgery to need a second treatment for the condition within two years.
For now, bypass surgery remains the gold standard for treating symptoms of peripheral artery disease (PAD), but the Johns Hopkins researchers are hopeful that further study will confirm the advantage their study shows for the stents.
The researchers, reporting online in the Journal of Vascular Surgery, ...
More efficient catalytic converters on autos, improved batteries and more sensitive gas sensors are some of the potential benefits of a new system that can directly measure the manner in which nanocrystals adsorb and release hydrogen and other gases.
The technique, which was developed by Vanderbilt University Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Rizia Bardhan, is described in a paper published online Aug. 4 by the journal Nature Materials.
In the last 30 years, there has been a tremendous amount of research studying nanocrystals – tiny crystals ...
Researchers in the University of Arizona's department of ecology and evolutionary biology have found that despite differences in appearance, trees across species share remarkably similar architecture and can tell scientists a lot about an entire forest.
Just by looking at a tree's branching pattern, it turns out, scientists can gather clues about how it functions – for example how much carbon dioxide it exchanges with the atmosphere or how much water transpires through its leaves – regardless of the tree's shape or species.
The researchers' results, published in the ...
Something big is about to happen on the sun. According to measurements from NASA-supported observatories, the sun's vast magnetic field is about to flip.
"It looks like we're no more than three to four months away from a complete field reversal," said solar physicist Todd Hoeksema of Stanford University. "This change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system."
The sun's magnetic field changes polarity approximately every 11 years. It happens at the peak of each solar cycle as the sun's inner magnetic dynamo re-organizes itself. The coming reversal will ...
A Penn State-led research team has found that changes to proteins called histones, which are associated with DNA, can control whether or not a gene is allowed to function. The changes may be important in maintaining the genes' "expression potential" so that future cells behave as their parent cells did. The discovery, which may have implications for the study of diseases such as cancer, will be published in a print edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was led by Lu Bai, an assistant professor of biochemistry, molecular biology, ...
UC San Francisco researchers have developed a two-minute assessment tool to help hospital staff predict a patient’s risk of delirium, a change in mental cognition characterized by severe confusion and disorientation that can prolong hospital stays.
The condition, which occurs in as many as one in five hospitalized patients, tends to develop rapidly and can lead to higher death rates and increased health care costs.
The new tool is designed to be simple, efficient and accurate in helping to assess and treat patients at risk of developing delirium, the scientists ...
