Reciprocal regulation of the neural and innate immune systems

By Michael R. Irwin, Steve W. Cole. Nature reviews. Immunology, 2011

842 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Innate immune responses are regulated by microorganisms and cell death, as well as by a third class of stress signal from the nervous and endocrine systems. The innate immune system also feeds back, through the production of cytokines, to regulate the function of the central nervous system (CNS), and this has effects on behaviour. These signals provide an extrinsic regulatory circuit that links physiological, social and environmental conditions, as perceived by the CNS, with transcriptional 'decision-making' in leukocytes. CNS-mediated regulation of innate immune responses optimizes total organism fitness and provides new opportunities for therapeutic control of chronic infectious, inflammatory and neuropsychiatric diseases.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Biological Psychiatry, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b4f472b643024f621c7310d684bc8e247e3f05b3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Behavioral Neuroscience

In Biological Psychiatry

In Neurology

Citations in the corpus

Early-Life Adversity and Physical and Emotional Health across the Lifespan: A Neuro-Immune Network Hypothesis (2015, background): “Even if it does not, the functional connections between these systems are likely to result in cross-sensitization (11,70), wherein larger neural threat responses, acting via the SNS and HPA axis, amplify inflammation and vice-versa.”
From Stress to Inflammation and Major Depressive Disorder: A Social Signal Transduction Theory of Depression (2014, background): “The first effector pathway that regulates systemic inflammation is the SNS.”
Why Sleep Is Important for Health: A Psychoneuroimmunology Perspective (2014, background): “In contrast to HPA activation, the SNS “steers” immune responses between antiviral and proinflammatory immune responses (Irwin & Cole 2011).”
Nature Contact and Human Health: A Research Agenda (2017, background): “Stress recovery and immune function mechanisms may not be distinct because of reciprocal relationships between these two physiologic systems (Irwin and Cole 2011; Nusslock and Miller 2016).”
Inflammation: depression fans the flames and feasts on the heat. (2015, background): “Peripherally releasedcytokines sendsignals viamolecular, cellular, and neural routes, which ultimately reach the brain and enhance CNS inflammation (2, 19, 20).”
Sleep Disturbance, Sleep Duration, and Inflammation: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Cohort Studies and Experimental Sleep Deprivation (2015, background): “Sleep influences two primary effector systems, the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis and the sympathetic nervous system, which together shift the basal gene expression profile toward increased proinflammatory skewing (14,123).”