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The brain can recall and reawaken past immune responses
- DoreenMichele 5y agoAt first glance, it seems to support the idea that biofeedback can be effective, at least to some degree and for some things.
- panabee 5y agoyes and perhaps some placebo effects activate stored immunological responses.
- DoreenMichele 5y agoMy understanding is sugar pills are commonly used as a placebo. Sugar helps take the edge off pain, though it doesn't work the same as a pain killer. People going through withdrawal tend to be sugar fiends. So I'm a bit skeptical of the assumption that "placebos do absolutely nothing, medically speaking" to begin with. (Not dismissing your suggestion here.)
- cpncrunch 5y agoPlacebos generally aren't sugar pills, unless there is sugar in the medication itself (which I don't think is generally the case). They are designed to be impossible to tell apart from the active medication. The pain-killing effect has nothing to do with sugar.
- DoreenMichele 5y agoA placebo is a substance or treatment which is designed to have no therapeutic value. Common placebos include inert tablets (like sugar pills)... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo Not to say Wikipedia is infallible. I'm sure it's not. Just checking how clueless I am and the internet suggests my understanding is "common knowledge." Perhaps you can share more of your knowledge about what placebo pills typically contain and enlighten us? (Citations welcome should you choose to share.)
- cpncrunch 5y agoActually, I did some searching and it seems that most RCTs don't actually list the contents of the placebo pill. I found this article which describes the problem: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-whats-placebo-idUSTRE69H51L20101018 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-whats-placebo-idUSTRE69H5...
- DoreenMichele 5y agoThank you. Very enlightening and happily agrees with both your statements (that they usually aren't sugar pills) and mine (that placebos themselves may have medical impact).
- freeest-will 5y ago> For example, in the COVID-19 vaccine developed by the University of Oxford, the control group receives a meningitis and septicaemia vaccine as a placebo. > The benefit of using an actual vaccine as the placebo control is that it will cause a similar reaction at the site of the injection as the COVID-19 vaccine, such as muscle pain and soreness. This prevents patients from knowing whether they are getting the placebo or the real treatment. https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-vaccine-why-its-important-to-know-whats-in-the-placebo-146365 https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-vaccine-why-its-impo...
- DoreenMichele 5y agoThank you.
- maxerickson 5y agoA few hundred milligrams bound in a pill is probably different than a bowl of ice cream or bar of chocolate.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cpncrunch 5y agoI think more technically it is nocebo effects which cause the (bad) immune response, whereas the placebo effect cancels or at least ameliorates it. Paul Garner has described how worry about covid helped to maintain his long-covid / ME/CFS symptoms, and he was finally able to recover after addressing those fears: https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/25/paul-garner-on-his-recovery-from-long-covid/ https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/25/paul-garner-on-his-reco... I managed to fully recover from ME/CFS myself 20 years ago with a similar route (with no symptoms since). In my case I don't think there was any significant worry about the illness itself, it was more pre-existing life stressors that I had to deal with, with the viral infection being the final straw for my body.
- inter_netuser 5y agoHow did you do to recover exactly?
- cpncrunch 5y agoHappy to discuss further in private. See my profile.
- inter_netuser 5y agoSent
- dham 5y agoI think that some people have post viral mental disorders. Or just general mental problems after going through anything out of the ordinary with their body. After going through Thyroid Cancer I generally don't give two thoughts about much of anything, while people at work are 25 years old and getting boosters for Covid. Some kind of mental thing going on here. One thing I also found out during this pandemic is people generally don't get sick which was surprising to me since I have 2 kids and have generally been sick with a cold every 2 to 3 months for a decade. Maybe that's why Covid wasn't that bad for me? Although it did put me on my ass for 2 days.
- crehn 5y agoPlacebo is such an interesting phenomenon. I had a certain physical pain difficult to describe that I could’ve sworn to have felt, but after addressing my perspective I’ve no longer had any such symptoms. Not sure if related, but I still don’t understand it.
- newby 5y ago> after addressing my perspective Could you please elaborate on that?
- lloeki 5y ago(don't want to put words in GP's mouth, this is my interpretation of it, and my experience) I do skateboarding and had multiple ankle sprains. What happens every single time is that the wound heals, physiotherapy proceeds and strengthens the whole joint system, and then I'm left with an ankle that is still in pain when it should not physically be anymore since it has fully recovered. That is, until I literally "decide" the remaining pain is a construct of my mind, and then the pain vanishes overnight, and the ankle that I felt brittle and was scared to use to its full extend suddenly feels as strong and stable as ever, if not more.
- vkk8 5y agoIn the (power)lifting scene, I have really enjoyed the articles by Austin Baraki et al. from Barbell Medicine on pains and aches in the context of physical activities. See for example https://startingstrength.com/article/aches-and-pains https://startingstrength.com/article/aches-and-pains or https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/the-barbell-medicine-guide-to-tendinopathy/ https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/the-barbell-medicine-gu... In a nutshell, the idea that there's a straightforward causal link between something being physically broken in your body and you feeling pain is simply wrong. Sometimes people feel pain in various body parts without any detectable physical changes and sometimes classical training injuries, like herniated spinal disks, can be found by medical imaging without the person feeling any pain at all. Also the common advice to rest until the pain subsides is often - but no always - wrong; there are plenty of anecdotes of people with completely fucked up knees or ankles or back starting heavy powerlifting program and suddenly healing from their injuries or at least learning to use their body in such a way that the injuries don't bother them anymore.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoDid you see Ross Douthat’s NYT piece on using EMF vibrations to cure his Lyme disease? Using a Rife machine. He knows it doesn’t work but still thinks it works.
- gwern 5y agoPreprint fulltext: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.03.409813v2.full https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.03.409813v2.... "Remembering immunity: Neuronal ensembles in the insular cortex encode and retrieve specific immune responses", Koren et al 2020
- NavinF 5y agoPeople who have more background than me: What does this have to do with memory and recall of immune responses? So they infected a mouse, monitored the mouse’s neurons to see which ones are active during inflammation, then waited a while, then hit those neurons again and observed inflammation even though there’s no disease the second time. If they hit the “same” neurons in a mouse that never had the disease in its lifetime, wouldn’t they observe inflammation without memory? (I don’t think they tried it)
- jacobsimon 5y agoThat’s a really good question. I didn’t read the full paper yet, but I think one of the important discoveries here is that there’s a direct causal relationship from brain->immune system in the first place that would allow them to trigger specific responses. It’s also probably hard to target those same specific neurons without first triggering the immune response since that’s part of their method for finding them.
- tremon 5y agoThe prevailing knowledge about the immune system says that immune responses are stored in T-cell reservoirs, not in the brain, and that immune cells are produced autonomously from the bone marrow in response to immune cell activity in the body. The brain doesn't inform or control this system. This research seems to indicate that not only are specific immune responses stored in some area of the brain, the brain can trigger such a response by itself. (I'm not a biologist or MD, though)
- mmastrac 5y agoIt'll be interesting to see if this validates the bizarre claims of the Wim Hof method. I'm skeptical, but the evidence _seems_ to suggest a lot of conscious control over some autonomic functions.
- mountainriver 5y agoWin Hof has actually had legitimate studies done where he has proven he can activate his immune system with his mind
- User23 5y agoGiven the brain’s regulatory role in virtually every aspect of homeostasis, I’m surprised that folks are surprised that by mental exercises autonomous functions can be influenced if not controlled. Wim Hof is interesting, but any Hindu can tell you that yogis have been performing similar feats for millennia.
- panabee 5y agothis is a great point re the brain's regulatory role. thanks for sharing. can you recommend terms to google to learn more about what mental exercises yogis do and can achieve immunologically?
- asdff 5y agoThe wikipedia article on wim hof where they quoted the study seems a lot more believable: " . . . forceful respiration results in increased sympathetic innervation and glucose consumption in intercostal muscle, generating heat that dissipates to lung tissue and warms circulating blood in the pulmonary capillaries. Our results provide compelling evidence for the primacy of the brain (CNS) rather than the body (peripheral mechanisms) in mediating the Iceman's [Wim Hof's] responses to cold exposure.[28]" By hyperventillating you are just flexing your intercostal muscle and that's warming your body. If you sat there flexing your quads or your core over and over you would probably get a similar sensation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof
- sam1r 5y agoSimilar: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-immune-system-protects-the-brain-20210428/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-immune-system-protect... ^^ same author as well
- andy_ppp 5y agoSometimes I think consciousness is an accidental side effect of a whole load of other processes that we don’t even notice happening.
- phito 5y agoAnd all/some of these other processes might be conscious too, but we just can't communicate with them
- amelius 5y agoOr perhaps the processes are an accidental side effect of consciousness.
- andy_ppp 5y agoI’ll get downvoted for this pseudoscience, but I sometimes wonder if free will is the feeling of the infinite number of universes splitting and your “choice” is merely which branch you ended up in…
- amelius 5y ago"Side effect" is perhaps not the right term, since the effect loops back into the processes; evidence for that is that we are talking about consciousness.
- pengstrom 5y agoDo we know this is true? Could the loop back also be an illusion? From a cursory glance it seems like "free will" is massively exaggerated. However, the belief of free will seems to be healthy.
- r0b05 5y agoPlease elaborate on why you think free will is exaggerated and how it could be healthy. I'm really interested in this being a meditator.
- pfortuny 5y agoMice, people, do not get too carried away…
- vixen99 5y agoFair enough. We should be cautious but meanwhile almost every gene found in mice so far has been found in a closely related form in humans. Of the approximately 4,000 genes that have been studied, less than 10 are found in humans but not in mice.
- inter_netuser 5y agoDoes poor memory result in poor immune response?
- vaylian 5y agoThere is more than one type of memory in biology. Just like there are different types of memory in computing.
- inter_netuser 5y agoYes, but any type of memory decline linked to immunity decline would be interesting, as memory performance is known to decline in older adults, who also have a decline in immune function. What’s really interesting, thymus involution becomes more or less clinically relevant just around the time cognitive performance begins to decline.
- kortex 5y agoI've heard it phrased "Stress wrecks the body in strange ways." It is one of the best aphorisms I've been given. A physiologist friend told me this years ago when I was remarking how it seems like psychological stress seems to cause every subsystem of the body to freak out, yet there's no obvious connection between these things - why should the brain, which is evolutionarily "late", affect such deep subsystems? This paper offers a clue into just such a connection. Immuno-psychiatry might be the next big thing.
- tdrdt 5y agoThis is also the reason why a lock-down against a virus is not always the best option for healthy people. A lock-down causes stress and this weakens the immune system. Personally I think it is obvious why the connection between stress and 'subsystems' is there. Stress puts the body into survival mode. Heavy breathing is an example. But when the stress holds on for too long it exhausts your body causing all kinds of trouble. The most extreme example is a burnout.
- wellpast 5y agoTake this a step further and consider vaccine mandates. However flawed or not the antivaxxer's reasoning, imagine the stress of having to choose between yours and your children's livelihood or being forced to inject a substance you consider risky into yours or your child's body.
- ASalazarMX 5y agoThe bulk of that fear comes from ignorance about how vaccines work, and there's enough reputable sources to get educated for free, learn how they have worked in the past, and make an informed decision. It's more stressful to be sick two weeks and struggling to breathe because you got COVID, and I'm saying that as an asthmatic who is not scared of mild difficulty to breathe. There is no sensible posture to rationalize antivaxing, but every country has a percent of the population who hesitates about vaccination, and a percent that not only refuses it, but stubbornly refuses to practice hygienic measures. This should be taken into account when designing future health programs.
- pengstrom 5y agoAlso relevant, the Behavioral Immune System and it's many vexing consequences. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_immune_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_immune_system
- baq 5y agothis gives a tiny sliver of credibility to stories about people focusing really hard for really long on imagining tumors being eaten by their immune system and this actually happening. used to sound like total crap, now... just crap? it'd be amazing if it wasn't.
- oofoe 5y agoSee also, "Carcinoma Angels", Norman Spinrad, 1967.
- OneTimePetes 5y agoSo a rheumatic disease, could basically be something aching to a immunological ptsd?
- GhettoComputers 5y agoNeurons and the immune system are deeply linked. They found that anxiety is caused by a weak immune system and strengthening the immune system will lower anxiety. They have been injecting viruses into animal brains and doing gain of function edits on viruses for understanding fear responses in mammals and making them more infectious to mice and apes to study their brains after viral infection. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4568141/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4568141/ >The use of viral vector technology to deliver short hairpin RNAs (shRNAs) to cells of the nervous system of many model organisms has been widely utilized by neuroscientists to study the influence of genes on behavior. However, there have been numerous reports that delivering shRNAs to the nervous system can lead to neurotoxicity. Here we report the results of a series of experiments where adeno-associated viruses (AAV), that were engineered to express shRNAs designed to target known plasticity associated genes (i.e. Arc, Egr1 and GluN2A) or control shRNAs that were designed not to target any rat gene product for depletion, were delivered to the rat basal and lateral nuclei of the amygdala (BLA), and auditory Pavlovian fear conditioning was examined. If anyone doubts the effects of infection on the brain and just says its just a mouse experiment consider the effect of mental effects of untreated syphilis. Its been observed throughout history. They only do experiments on rodents but many have been "humanized" like giving them genetic diseases like making rats that are genetically prone to depression, obesity or having fatty liver disease. They have even used human stem cells to transplant human livers into rats. https://www.upmcphysicianresources.com/news/060220-mini-liver-in-rats https://www.upmcphysicianresources.com/news/060220-mini-live...