inflammation

Use Nature, Art, And Religion To Boost Your Body’s Defense System, University of California, Berkeley (CAL) Study

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Add Nature, Art And Religion To Life’s Best Anti-Inflammatories

Berkeley- Taking in such spine-tingling wonders as the Grand Canyon, Sistine Chapel ceiling or Schubert’s “Ave Maria” may give a boost to the body’s defense system, according to new research from UC Berkeley.

Researchers have linked positive emotions – especially the awe we feel when touched by the beauty of nature, art and spirituality – with lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, which are proteins that signal the immune system to work harder.

“Our findings demonstrate that positive emotions are associated with the markers of good health,” said Jennifer Stellar, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto and lead author of the study, which she conducted while at UC Berkeley.

While cytokines are necessary for herding cells to the body’s battlegrounds to fight infection, disease and trauma, sustained high levels of cytokines are associated with poorer health and such disorders as type-2 diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and even Alzheimer’s disease and clinical depression.

It has long been established that a healthy diet and lots of sleep and exercise bolster the body’s defenses against physical and mental illnesses. But the Berkeley study, whose findings were just published in the journal Emotion, is one of the first to look at the role of positive emotions in that arsenal.

 

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Platelets Fan Inflammation

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The circulating blood cells bind to neutrophils, prompting inflammation-related activity in these immune cell partners.

 

During a local inflammatory response, white blood cells called neutrophils bind to the sides of blood vessels and crawl along them. This allows neutrophils to migrate toward infection: the cells find favorable locations to exit the blood vessels and migrate into infected tissues, where they engulf pathogens. Initiating this process requires that activated platelets bind to a protein called PSGL-1 that neutrophils project into the blood stream like antennae, according to a paper published today (December 4) in Science. When neutrophils are unable to bind to platelets, they fail to migrate normally, and inflammation is reduced.

“It’s a very interesting concept that platelets would be so important in inflammation and in regulating neutrophil biology,” said Paul Kubes, an immunologist at the University of Calgary in Canada who was not involved in the study. “I think people are starting to appreciate that platelets are becoming more and more important in immunity.”

Study coauthor Andrés Hidalgo, an immunologist at the Spanish National Center for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC), refers to the interaction between neutrophils and platelets as a checkpoint: it confirms to the neutrophils that there has been an insult to the body. Inflammatory cytokines spur the lining of the blood vessels to become activated and the neutrophils to bind them, but this alone is not sufficient to activate the full inflammatory response. The presence of activated platelets indicates a vascular injury. “It’s not only that . . . the vessel gets activated in this local place were you get the injury,” said Hidalgo. “You need the circulation to tell you something is really wrong.”

 

Full article on TheScientist

Protein Clumps Spread Inflammation ASC specks

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Protein Clumps Spread Inflammation ASC specks—protein aggregations that drive inflammation—are released from dying immune cells, expanding the reach of a defense response.

 

Research teams based in Germany and Spain have independently discovered that cells transmit inflammation by releasing ASC specks, bacteria-sized clumps of protein key for cytokines’ maturation, according to two papers appearing today (June 22) in Nature Immunology. The protein aggregations are a component of inflammasomes, which sense pathogens and cell damage and set off innate immune inflammation. Researchers previously thought inflammasomes acted only inside single cells, but this latest work has found that the ASC specks can effect extracellular inflammation. The teams also found that macrophages can take up released ASC specks, perpetuating the immune response.

ASC specks are prevalent in the tissues of people with some inflammatory diseases, and could be drug targets for reducing inflammation or diagnostic markers of these diseases, the researchers noted.

Their findings help explain the mystery of how relatively localized contact between a cell and a pathogen or product of cell damage can lead to widespread inflammation, explained George Dubyak, a cell physiologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who was not involved in the study. “The inflammasome specks can become carriers for intracellular signaling,” he said.

“I think this is much-needed information on how inflammation may actually spread after inflammasome activation and offers a whole host of activities for intervention now that have been unexplored,” saidRobert Keane, a professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine who was not involved in the study.

 

Full story at TheScientist

Chronic prostate inflammation tied to nearly double risk of prostate cancer

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A new study led by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore, MD, finds that compared to men with no such signs, men with chronic inflammation in non-cancerous prostate tissue may have nearly double the risk of developing prostate cancer.

The study also finds that the link between chronic prostate inflammation and prostate cancer may be even stronger in men with high grade cancers – those with a Gleason score between 7 and 10. The Gleason score is assessed by looking at cancer cells under a microscope: a higher grade usually means more abnormal-looking cells and the cancer is growing faster.

 

Full story at MNT