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Found: the dial in the brain that controls the immune system
Scientists identify the brain cells that regulate inflammation, and pinpoint how they keep tabs on the immune response.
The results, published on 1 May in Nature 1, suggest that the brain maintains a delicate balance between the molecular signals that promote inflammation and those that dampen it — a finding that could lead to treatments for autoimmune diseases and other conditions caused by an excessive immune response. However, the specific brain neurons that are activated by immune stimuli remained elusive, says Hao Jin, a neuroimmunologist at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, who led the work. Finding ways to control this newly discovered body–brain network would offer an approach to fixing broken immune responses in various conditions such as autoimmune diseases and even long COVID, a debilitating syndrome that can persist for years after a SARS-CoV-2 infection, Jin says.
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