Neuronal Modulation Of The Immune Response

摘要

The nervous and immune systems respond in distinct manners to diverse signals. Crosstalk between these systems has been known: microbial infections can result in inflammation of nervous tissue and lead to conditions such as encephalitis and meningitis. Also, the immune response causes damage to nervous tissue during autoimmune diseases: extensive axonal damage is observed in multiple sclerosis due to demyelination and infiltration by leukocytes (Mix et al 2007). To study the roles of immune molecules, researchers often use a mouse model of multiple sclerosis known as experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis in which disease is induced upon injection of myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein in Complete Freund's adjuvant. Here, inflammatory cytokines, e.g. Interferon-y (Tran et al 2000) and Tumour necrosis Factor-α (Liu et al 1998), or Toll-like receptors (TLR)-4 or TLR-9, which detect microbial constituents (Marta et al 2008), play regulatory roles to reduce disease severity. In cases like these, it is not too surprising that inflammatory immune molecules affect nervous tissues. On the other hand, proper understanding is lacking on how neuronal products modulate immune reactions, especially with respect to anti-pathogen responses.