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Your Brain Could Be Controlling How Sick You Get—and How You Recover

Scientists are deciphering how the brain choreographs immune responses, hoping to find treatments for a range of diseases

Image of neuronal cells.

Neuronal cells (red) in the gut interface with cells of the immune system (green).

Credit:

Lara Santos/Veiga-Fernandes Lab

Hundreds of scientists around the world are looking for ways to treat heart attacks. But few started where Hedva Haykin did: in the brain. Haykin, a doctoral student at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, wants to know whether stimulating a region of the brain involved in positive emotion and motivation can influence how the heart heals.

In late 2022, in a small, windowless room, Haykin pulled out slides from a thin black box one by one. On them were slices of hearts, no bigger than pumpkin seeds, from mice that had experienced heart attacks. Under a microscope some of the samples were clearly marred by scars left in the aftermath of the infarction. Others showed mere speckles of damage among streaks of healthy, red-stained cells.

The difference in the hearts' appearance originated in the brain, Haykin explains. The healthier-looking samples came from mice that had received stimulation of a brain area involved in positive emotion and motivation. Those marked with scars were from unstimulated mice.


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“In the beginning we were sure that it was too good to be true,” Haykin says. It was only after repeating the experiment several times, she adds, that she was able to accept that the effect she was seeing was real.

Haykin, alongside her supervisors at the Technion—Asya Rolls, a neuroimmunologist, and Lior Gepstein, a cardiologist—is trying to work out exactly how this happens. On the basis of their experiments, the results of which have not yet been published, activation of this reward center in the brain—called the ventral tegmental area (VTA)—seems to trigger immune changes that contribute to the reduction of scar tissue.

This study has its roots in decades of research pointing to the contribution of a person's psychological state to their heart health. In a well-known condition known as broken heart syndrome, an extremely stressful event can generate the symptoms of a heart attack—and can, in rare cases, be fatal. Conversely, studies have suggested that a positive mindset can lead to better outcomes in those with cardiovascular disease. But the mechanisms behind these links remain elusive.

Rolls is used to being surprised by the results in her laboratory, where the main focus is on how the brain directs the immune response and how this connection influences health and disease. Although Rolls can barely contain her excitement as she discusses her group's eclectic mix of ongoing studies, she's also cautious. Because of the often unexpected nature of her team's discoveries, she never lets herself believe an experiment's results until they have been repeated multiple times—a policy Haykin and others in her group have adopted. “You need to convince yourself all the time with this stuff,” Rolls says.

For Rolls, the implications of this work are broad. She wants to provide an explanation for a phenomenon that many clinicians and researchers are aware of: mental states can have a profound effect on how ill we get—and how well we recover. In Rolls's view, working out the mechanism for this influence could enable physicians to tap into the power of the mind over the body. Understanding the link could help scientists boost the placebo effect, destroy cancers, enhance responses to vaccination and even reevaluate illnesses that for centuries have been dismissed as psychologically driven, she says. “I think we're ready to say that psychosomatic [conditions] can be treated differently.”

A neuroscientist readies a participant for a brain scan.

Neuroscientist Talma Hendler readies a participant for a brain scan. The results will inform a study of whether learning to control brain activity can improve a person’s immune response to a vaccine. Credit: Sagol Brain Institute/Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center

She is part of a growing group of scientists who are mapping out the brain's control over the body's immune responses. There are multiple lines of communication between the nervous and immune systems—from small local circuits in organs such as the skin to longer-range routes beginning in the brain—with roles in a wide variety of diseases from autoimmunity to cancer. This field “has really exploded over the past several years,” says Filip Swirski, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

Some parts of the system—such as the vagus nerve, a huge highway of some 100,000 nerve fibers that connects the brain to the heart, lungs, gastrointestinal tract, and other major organs—have inspired treatments for several autoimmune diseases that progressed to testing in clinical trials. Other studies investigating ways to recruit the brain itself—which some think could provide powerful therapies—are still nascent. Rolls, for one, has begun examining whether the pathways her team has found in mice are also present in humans, and she has launched a start-up company to try to develop treatments based on the group's findings.

Although these developments are encouraging to researchers, much is still a mystery. “We often have a black box between the brain and the effect we see in the periphery,” says Henrique Veiga-Fernandes, a neuroimmunologist at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon. “If we want to use it in the therapeutic context, we actually need to understand the mechanism.”

A Tale of Two Systems

For more than a century scientists have been finding hints of a close-knit relation between the nervous and immune systems. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, for example, scientists demonstrated that cutting nerves to the skin could curb some hallmarks of inflammation.

It wasn't until the late 1990s that researchers in this field began drawing connections to the body's master conductor, the brain. Neurosurgeon Kevin Tracey, then at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., and his colleagues found something unexpected while investigating whether an experimental anti-inflammatory drug could help tame brain inflammation caused by stroke.

When delivered into the brains of rodents that had experienced strokes, the drug had the expected effect: it reduced neuroinflammation. As a control, the team injected the drug into the brains of animals that had inflammation throughout their bodies, thinking it would work exclusively in the brain. To their surprise, it also worked in the body. “This was a real head-scratcher,” says Tracey, now president and chief executive of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in Manhasset.

After months of trying to determine the path of the drug from brain to body, the researchers decided to cut the vagus nerve. With that nerve snipped, the anti-inflammatory effect of the brain-administered drug disappeared.

Neuroscientists look at images of neurons.

Neuroscientists Catherine Dulac (right) and Jessica Osterhout look at images of neurons in the hypothalamus that control symptoms of sickness, such as fever and loss of appetite. Credit: Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Inspired by this discovery, Tracey's group and others continued to explore other ways in which the vagus nerve—and the rest of the nervous system—directs immune responses. A driving force for these developments, Swirski says, has been the advent of scientific tools that enable scientists to begin to chart the interactions between the nervous and immune systems in an unprecedented way. Some researchers are focusing on particular body systems. For instance, a team led by Andreas Habenicht, a cardiologist at LMU Munich in Germany, reported in 2022 that the interaction between immune cells and nerves in the outermost layer of artery walls modulated the progression of atherosclerosis, an inflammatory disease in which vessels become clogged with cholesterol and other substances.

Meanwhile Veiga-Fernandes and his group have documented clusters of neuronal and immune cells in various tissues and discovered how they work together to sense damage and mobilize immune reactions. His team is now looking at how these little switchboards can be controlled by the brain.

The brain itself is also beginning to give up its secrets. Neuroscientist Catherine Dulac and her team at Harvard University have pinpointed neurons in an area called the hypothalamus that control symptoms that include fever, warmth-seeking, and loss of appetite in response to infection. “Most people probably assume that when you feel sick, it's because the bacteria or viruses are messing up your body,” she says. But her group demonstrated that activating these neurons could generate symptoms of sickness even in the absence of a pathogen. An open question, Dulac adds, is whether these hypothalamic neurons can be activated by triggers other than pathogens, such as chronic inflammation.

Just above the hypothalamus sits the insula, a region that is involved in processing emotion and bodily sensations. In a 2021 study, Tamar Koren, then one of Rolls's doctoral students, found that neurons in the insula store memories of past bouts of gut inflammation—and that stimulating those brain cells reactivated the immune response.

Rolls, Koren and their colleagues suspect that such a reaction might prime the body to fight potential threats. But these reactions could also backfire and start up in the absence of the original trigger. This could be the case for certain conditions, such as irritable bowel syndrome, that can be exacerbated by negative psychological states.

Mind Over Matter

Many scientists hope to pin down how such mental states influence immune responses.

Rolls and Fahed Hakim, a pediatrician and director of Nazareth Hospital EMMS in Israel, were inspired to investigate this question after coming across a 1989 study reporting that among women with breast cancer, those who underwent supportive group therapy and self-hypnosis in addition to routine cancer care survived longer than those who received only the standard treatment. Several other studies have documented a similar link between survival and the mental states of people with cancer.

To test the link, Rolls, Hakim and their team zoomed in on the VTA—the same region they targeted in the heart attack study and in a previous experiment looking at bacterial infection. This time they focused on mice with lung and skin tumors. Activating neurons in the VTA noticeably shrank the cancers. It turned out that VTA activation subdued cells in the bone marrow that would usually repress immune activity, freeing the immune system to fight the cancer.

Clinicians have known about the effect of positive thinking on disease progression for a long time, Hakim says. But this evidence has been largely anecdotal or correlational, so being able to identify a pathway through which such an effect occurs—and manipulate it experimentally in animals—makes it much more real, he says.

Negative mental states can also influence the body's immune response. In a 2022 study, Swirski and his team identified specific brain circuits that mobilize immune cells in the bodies of mice during acute stress. The researchers found two pathways, one originating in the motor cortex that directed immune cells to the site of injury or infection and another beginning in the hypothalamus—a key responder in times of stress—that reduced the number of immune cells circulating in the blood. Swirski's group subsequently started investigating the role of stress-mediated circuits in chronic inflammatory diseases.

Neuroscientist Jeremy Borniger of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and his colleagues have also found that activating neurons in the mouse hypothalamus can generate an immune response. They have examined how manipulation of these cells can alter tumor growth.

Some groups are hoping to replicate their findings in humans. Swirski's team, for instance, plans to use tools such as virtual reality to alter people's stress levels and see how that changes their immune response.

Koren and Rolls are working with Talma Hendler, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, to see whether boosting the reward system in people's brains before they receive a vaccine can improve their immune response. Rather than stimulating the brain directly, they are using a method called neurofeedback. In this approach, individuals learn to observe and control their own brain activity, which researchers measure using methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging.

The Road to the Clinic

Over the years Rolls has chatted with her good friend Tehila Ben-Moshe about her research. Ben-Moshe is chief executive of Biond Biologics, an Israel-based biopharmaceutical company that focuses on using immune cells to target cancer. During one such discussion in 2022, Ben-Moshe realized that Rolls's brain-stimulation experiments were acting on some of the same immune cells her company was trying to target, and she immediately saw the therapeutic potential. “When I saw Asya's data, I couldn't believe what I saw,” Ben-Moshe says. “The question then became, How can I translate what she's doing with mice into patients?” The two are working on launching a company.

Ben-Moshe and Rolls hope to harness existing brain-stimulation technologies—for example, transcranial magnetic stimulation, which uses magnetic pulses to alter brain activity, or focused ultrasound, which uses sound waves—to modulate the immune systems of people with cancer, autoimmune diseases, or other conditions. As a first step, their team reached out to companies that have developed such technologies. Before starting their clinical trials, Ben-Moshe and Rolls wanted to examine blood samples from past trials that used these techniques so they could see whether there were signs of immune system alterations before and after treatment.

Potential therapies targeting the vagus nerve are nearer the clinic. A company co-founded by Tracey—SetPoint Medical in Valencia, Calif.—has tested pill-sized nerve stimulators implanted in the vagus nerve in the neck in people with autoimmune diseases such as Crohn's disease, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. The team running the rheumatoid arthritis trial showed in a small study in Europe that its device can reduce disease severity. The technique is currently undergoing a randomized, sham-controlled trial (in which the control group receives an implant but no active stimulation) in 250 patients in various centers across the U.S.

Rolls's hope is that this work will ultimately help physicians to understand, and act on, the mind-body connections they see in their practices. The need is clear: when Rolls put out a call to speak to psychologists from the hospital where her lab is based, the meeting room was packed. People from departments ranging from dermatology to oncology were eager to share their stories. Many clinicians pass people with seemingly psychosomatic issues on to psychologists, saying there is nothing physically wrong, one attendee said. This can be distressing for the person seeking treatment. Even being able to simply tell people that there is a brain-immune connection that is responsible for their symptoms can make an enormous difference.

It's time that both researchers and clinicians take the link between psychology and physiology seriously, Rolls says. “You can call something psychosomatic, but in the end, it's somatic. How long can we ignore what is there?”

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on February 22, 2023.

Diana Kwon is a freelance journalist who covers health and the life sciences. She is based in Berlin.

More by Diana Kwon

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SA Special Editions Vol 32 Issue 2This article was originally published with the title “Brain over Body” in SA Special Editions Vol. 32 No. 2 (), p. 104
doi:10.1038/scientificamericanrethebrain0623-104