How immune system detection may benefit spinal cord injury: Study

The immune system’s ability to respond to spinal cord injuries declines with aging, according to new research that also reveals potential ways to enhance that response and speed patient recovery. The new findings provide important insight into how the immune system responds to spinal cord injuries, and why this response blunts with the passing years. Furthermore, it reveals an important role for the membranes surrounding the spinal cord in mounting the immune response to spinal cord injury.

With this information, doctors may one day be able to enhance the body’s natural immune response to improve patient outcomes, particularly in older adults. Researcher Andrea Francesca M. Salvador said, “Recently, it has been reported that older individuals are more prone to spinal cord injury. Our findings show how the immune response is triggered in aging and compared to young people.” How do I solve it?” PhD from University of Virginia School of Medicine.

“Hopefully, our results can help identify points of intervention and drug targets that can improve recovery and address long-term consequences of injury, such as pain.”

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understanding spinal cord injuries

Spinal cord injuries can have devastating, lifelong effects, leaving patients unable to move, control their bowels, or experience pain, sexual dysfunction, or uncontrollable cramps, depending on the severity and location of the injury. depends on. A better understanding of how the body responds to spinal cord injuries is an important step toward developing better ways to treat them.

The new findings are the latest from the lab of Jonathan Kipnis, PhD, who in 2015 at UVA made a surprising discovery that the brain was connected to the immune system by vessels that no longer exist. Before this game-changing revelation, the brain was essentially isolated from the immune system.

The discovery of unknown vessels in the membranes surrounding the brain, or meninges, rewrote textbooks and opened up a whole new frontier in neurological research. Today, “neuroimmunology,” or the study of the nervous system’s relationship to the immune system, is one of the hottest areas of neuroscience research, and it looks set to transform our understanding of — and ability to treat — neurological diseases. a vast array.

Now Salvador, Kipnis and their colleagues have determined that the meninges surrounding the spinal cord play an essential role in the immune response to spinal cord injury. They discovered, for example, that previously unknown meningeal lymph “patches” form over the site of spinal cord injuries. More research is needed to determine exactly what these structures do, but their formation speaks to an important role for the spinal cord meninges in the immune response to injury.

In addition, Salvador and his colleagues determined how immune cells respond to spinal cord injuries. They found that this response was stronger in young lab mice than in older mice, suggesting that scientists may be able to target certain immune cells to improve recovery after spinal cord injuries.

Together, the findings identify the meninges of the spinal cord – and their interactions with other components of the central nervous system – as exciting new areas for researchers to explore as they reveal the body’s complex response to spinal cord injuries. Let’s try to understand better.

“This is an exciting discovery and one that could really lead to new therapeutic approaches for spinal cord injury patients,” said Kipnis, who is now a professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and its Brain Immunology and is the director of the Glia Center. big center). “We are now collaborating with clinicians in the hope of better understanding what is happening in human patients and how our findings can be translated to make a real difference.”