The immune system’s ability to respond to spinal cord injury declines with aging, according to new research, which also reveals potential ways to boost that response and speed patient recovery. The new findings provide important insights into how the immune system responds to spinal cord injury and why that response becomes blunted over the passing years. Further, it reveals an important role for the membranes surrounding the spinal cord in mounting resistance to spinal cord injury.
With this information, doctors may one day be able to strengthen the body’s natural immune response to improve patient outcomes, especially in older adults. “Recently, it has been reported that more elderly people experience spinal cord injury. Our findings suggest that in old age, there is an impairment in how immunity is initiated and resolved compared to young people,” said researcher Andrea Francesca M. Salvador, who has just received His Ph.D. from the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
“Hopefully, our findings can help identify intervention points and druggable targets that can improve recovery and address long-term consequences of injury, such as pain.”
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Understanding 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 uncontrolled seizures, 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.
The new findings are the latest from the lab of Jonathan Kipnis, PhD, who in 2015 at UVA made a stunning discovery that the brain was connected to the immune system by vessels long thought not to exist. Before this game-changing revelation, the brain was largely walled off from the immune system.
The discovery of the unknown vessels of the membrane or meninges around the brain rewrote the textbooks and opened a whole new frontier in neurological research. Today, “neuroimmunology,” or the study of the nervous system’s relationship with the immune system, is one of the hottest areas of neuroscience research, and it’s poised to transform our understanding of — and the ability to treat — a wide array of neurological diseases. .
Now Salvador, Kipnis and their colleagues have determined that the meninges surrounding the spinal cord play an essential role in the immune response to spinal cord injury. They discovered, for example, that previously unknown meningeal lymphatic “patches” form over the site of spinal cord injury. More research is needed to determine exactly what these structures do, but their structure suggests an important role for the spinal meninges in the immune response to injury.
Further, Salvador and his colleagues measured how immune cells respond to spinal-cord injury. They found that this response was much stronger in young lab mice than in older ones, suggesting that scientists may be able to target specific immune cells to improve recovery after spinal cord injury.
Together, the findings identify the spinal meninges—and their interactions with other components of the central nervous system—as exciting new areas for researchers to explore as they try to better understand the body’s complex response to spinal cord injury.
“This is an exciting discovery and one that could actually lead to new therapeutic approaches for patients with spinal cord injury,” said Kipnis, now a professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and director of its Brain Immunology and Glia Center (BIG Center). “We are now collaborating with clinicians in hopes of better understanding what is happening in human patients and how our findings can be translated to make a real difference.”
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