Brain micro-inflammation at specific vessels dysregulates organ-homeostasis via the activation of a new neural circuit

• Main Authors: Yasunobu Arima, Takuto Ohki, Naoki Nishikawa, Kotaro Higuchi, Mitsutoshi Ota, Yuki Tanaka, Junko Nio-Kobayashi, Mohamed Elfeky, Ryota Sakai, Yuki Mori, Tadafumi Kawamoto, Andrea Stofkova, Yukihiro Sakashita, Yuji Morimoto, Masaki Kuwatani, Toshihiko Iwanaga, Yoshichika Yoshioka, Naoya Sakamoto, Akihiko Yoshimura, Mitsuyoshi Takiguchi, Saburo Sakoda, Marco Prinz, Daisuke Kamimura, Masaaki Murakami
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: eLife Sciences Publications Ltd 2017-08-01
• Series: eLife
• Subjects: brain micro-inflammation; organ function; EAE; multiple sclerosis; neurodegenerative disease
• Online Access: https://elifesciences.org/articles/25517

Impact of stress on diseases including gastrointestinal failure is well-known, but molecular mechanism is not understood. Here we show underlying molecular mechanism using EAE mice. Under stress conditions, EAE caused severe gastrointestinal failure with high-mortality. Mechanistically, autoreactive-pathogenic CD4+ T cells accumulated at specific vessels of boundary area of third-ventricle, thalamus, and dentate-gyrus to establish brain micro-inflammation via stress-gateway reflex. Importantly, induction of brain micro-inflammation at specific vessels by cytokine injection was sufficient to establish fatal gastrointestinal failure. Resulting micro-inflammation activated new neural pathway including neurons in paraventricular-nucleus, dorsomedial-nucleus-of-hypothalamus, and also vagal neurons to cause fatal gastrointestinal failure. Suppression of the brain micro-inflammation or blockage of these neural pathways inhibited the gastrointestinal failure. These results demonstrate direct link between brain micro-inflammation and fatal gastrointestinal disease via establishment of a new neural pathway under stress. They further suggest that brain micro-inflammation around specific vessels could be switch to activate new neural pathway(s) to regulate organ homeostasis.