Relationship Between Immune System And Mental Illness

Relationship Between Immune System And Mental Illness.
In the chief controlled illustration of exactly how some psychiatric illnesses might be linked to an immune system gone awry, researchers boom they cured mice of an obsessive-compulsive condition known as "hair-pulling disorder" by tweaking the rodents' unaffected systems. Although scientists have noticed a link between the immune system and psychiatric illnesses, this is the leading evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship, said the authors of a study appearing in the May 28 conclusion of the journal Cell. The "cure" in this case was a bone marrow transplant, which replaced a incompetent gene with a normal one.

The excitement lies in the fact that this could open the way to new treatments for unusual mental disorders, although bone marrow transplants, which can be life-threatening in themselves, are not a likely candidate, at least not at this point. "There are some drugs already existing that are functional with respect to immune disorders," said haunt senior author Mario Capecchi, the recipient of a 2007 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. "This is very renewed information in terms of there being some kind of immune reaction in the body that could be contributing to mental vigour symptoms," said Jacqueline Phillips-Sabol, an assistant professor of neurosurgery and psychiatry at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine and top dog of the neuropsychology division at Scott & White in Temple, Texas. "This helps us persevere to unravel the mystery of mental illness, which reach-me-down to be shrouded in mysticism. We didn't know where it came from or what caused it".

However, Phillips-Sabol was sharp to point out that bone marrow transplants are not a reasonable treatment for mental health disorders. "That's likely a stretch at least at this point," she said. "Most patients who have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are utterly successfully treated with psychotherapy". "The story starts with a mouse mutant that has a very unusual behavior, which is very almost identical to the obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorder in humans called trichotillomania, when patients compulsively assassinate all their body hair," explained Capecchi, who is a distinguished professor of human genetics and biology at the University of Utah School of Medicine and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Some 2 percent to 3 percent of men and women worldwide go down from the disorder, he said. The same group of researchers had earlier discovered the ground for the odd behavior: these mice had changes in a gene known as Hoxb8. To their great surprise, the gene turns out to be confused in the development of microglia, a type of immune cell found in the perspicacity but originating in the bone marrow, whose known function is to clean up damage in the brain.

So "This was strange because microglia are strain of scavengers," Capecchi explained. "If you have a stroke or bacteria or virus which destroys tissue, these cells go in and inoffensive up the mess. But now we're saying they're involved with behavior".

When the researchers injected 10 mutant mice with bone marrow from conformist mice, the mice stopped their baneful behavior and grew their hair back within three months. When the procedure was performed in reverse, customary mice injected with abnormal Hoxb8 developed trichotillomania.

The experiment also showed that a high threshold for tolerating woe was not the cause of the disorder, as had been previously suspected. And immune system problems have been linked with a in one piece range of neuropsychiatric diseases including schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer's, bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, Capecchi said.

But "People have always seen an friendship between the behavioral pathology and a defective system with feature to immune system, but nobody could figure what is happening," Capecchi said. "Are you depressed, then the unsusceptible system isn't working well, or is the immune system not working well and you're more likely to be depressed? What we're saying is that there is a command connection between the two because the microglia derived from the bone marrow where the safe system arises affects the OCD behavior," he explained.

And "We know a lot more about the immune set than we know about our brain," said Capecchi. "We know almost nothing about how the brain works and less about how drugs work vito mol. If we require the immune system is important, this opens up a whole new vista of things we can do sparely because we know more about the immune system".