New Insights into How the Immune System Responds to Spinal-Cord Injuries

Offering important insights into how the immune system responds to spinal-cord injuries with years passing, may reveal an important role for the membranes surrounding the spinal cord in mounting the immune response to spinal cord injury. With this information, doctors one day may be able to bolster the body’s natural immune response to improve patient outcomes, particularly among older adults. Hopefully, new findings can improve recovery and address the long-term consequences of injury such as pain.

Looking Into Immune System May Lead to New Therapeutic Approaches for Spinal Cord-Injury

Spinal cord injuries can have devastating, lifelong effects, leaving patients unable to move, unable to control their bowels, or suffering pain, sexual dysfunction, or uncontrollable spasms, depending on the severity and location of the injury. A better understanding of how the body responds to spinal-cord injuries is an important step in developing better ways to treat them (1^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Global burden of traumatic brain and spinal cord injury

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Recently, it has been reported more aging individuals experience spinal cord injuries. The new findings published in the journal neuron suggest in aging, there is an impairment in how the immune response is initiated and resolved compared to young.

The latest findings from the lab of Jonathan Kipnis, Ph.D., who made a stunning discovery at UVA in 2015 that the brain was connected to the immune system by vessels long thought not to exist. Before this game changing revelation, the brain had been held to be essentially walled off from the immune system.

The discovery of the unknown vessels in the membranes, or meninges, surrounding the brain rewrote textbooks and opened a whole new frontier in neurological research (2^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Age-dependent immune and lymphatic responses after spinal cord injury

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Today, “neuroimmunology,” or the study of the nervous system’s relationship to the immune system, is one of the hottest areas of neuroscience research, and it is poised to transform our understanding of and ability to treat a vast array of neurological diseases.

Now researchers have determined that the meninges surrounding the spinal cord play an essential role in the immune response to spinal cord injury. More research is needed to determine exactly what these structures do, but their formation speaks to an important role for the spinal-cord meninges in the immune response to injury.

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Further, they quantified how immune cells respond to spinal-cord injuries. They found that this response was much stronger in young lab mice than in older ones, suggesting that scientists may be able to target certain immune cells to improve recovery after spinal cord injuries.

Together, the findings identify the spinal-cord meninges and their interactions with other components of the central nervous system – as exciting new areas for researchers to explore as they seek to better understand the body’s complex response to spinal cord injuries (3^✔ ✔Trusted Source
The meningeal transcriptional response to traumatic brain injury and aging

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Researchers are now collaborating with clinicians in the hope of better understanding what is happening in human patients and how our findings could be translated to make a real difference.

References:

1. Global burden of traumatic brain and spinal cord injury - (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laneur/article/PIIS1474-4422(18)30444-7/fulltext)
2. Age-dependent immune and lymphatic responses after spinal cord injury - (https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(23)00296-9)
3. The meningeal transcriptional response to traumatic brain injury and aging - (https://elifesciences.org/articles/81154)

Source-Eurekalert