Artificially stimulating the brain’s feel-good center boosts immunity in mice in a way that could help explain the power of placebos, a study reported on Monday.
“Our findings indicate that activation of areas of the brain associated with positive expectations can affect how the body copes with diseases,” said senior author Asya Rolls, an assistant professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s Faculty of Medicine.
The findings, reported in Nature Medicine, “might one day lead to the development of new drugs that utilize the brain’s potential to cure,” she said.
It has long been known that the human brain’s reward system, which mediates pleasure, can be activated with a dummy pill devoid of any active ingredients — known as a placebo — if the person taking it thinks it is real medicine.
“But it was not clear whether this could impact physical well-being,” Rolls said.
Rolls and colleagues incubated immune cells from mice exposed to deadly E coli bacteria after specific cells in the animals’ reward center had been stimulated.
These immune cells were at least twice as effective in killing bacteria than ordinary ones, they reported.
In a second test, the scientists vaccinated different mice with the same immune cells. Thirty days later, the new set of rodents was likewise twice as likely to be able to fight off infection.
The immune-boosting information emanated from a part of the brain called the ventral tegmental area, home to a reward system powered by the mood-modifying chemical dopamine.
This area lights up in brain scans when a mouse — or a human — knows that a meal, or a sexual encounter, is in the offing.
The study found that the message is then routed via the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for snap responses in a crisis situation, until it triggers the bacteria-fighting immune response.
Evolutionary pressures might play a key role, the researchers said.
“Feeding and sex expose one to bacteria,” Rolls said. “It would give one an evolutionary advantage if — when the reward system is activated — immunity is also boosted.”
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