Nat Neurosci: Reveal the effect of immune response on aging brain

January 12, 2021 // -- As humans age, the function of the body's organs will gradually decline.
Although many studies in the past have analyzed the effects of aging on the body, brain and cognitive abilities, the neurological mechanisms and environmental factors that accelerate or mitigate these effects are little known to researchers.
is well known that the immune system and nervous system play an important role in controlling the function of many organs of the body, and previous studies have shown that both systems change significantly during the body's aging process.
neuroscience has found that as the nervous system ages, so does the way the body controls its immune response, but researchers still don't know how aging of the nervous system affects the body's immune response and the resulting effects on brain function.
Photo Source: Jin et al. In a recent study published in the international journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists from Capital Medical University and Tianjin Medical University analyzed the likely effects of immune responses on the aging brain; Degradation (neuroblasts, such as embryonic cells derived from nerve fibers, etc.) increases the toxicity of natural killer cells (NK cells), which can impair nerve and cognitive function in the brain, a type of blood cell that belongs to the human body's immune system.
researcher Qiang Liu says systemic inflammation tends to increase during the body's aging process, but the potential effects of immune and inflammatory responses on the aging brain are unclear.
study aims to understand why immune cells accumulate in the brain during the body's aging process, and how much immune cells affect the regeneration and cognition of senescing brain tissue.
the paper, researchers analyzed brain tissue from aging human and mouse bodies and used a series of techniques to investigate the effects of immune responses on neurogenes and cognitive function.
Liu points out that we used single-cell sequencing, genealogy tracking, and flow cell technology to determine the properties of immune cells, and then we evaluated the processes that occur in the brain's nerves by immune staining of tissue slices, and finally, we conducted a behavioral assessment to analyze the effects of immune responses on cognitive function in the brain.
The researchers observed the accumulation of NK cells in specific areas of the brains of aging humans and mice, such as toothy back to neurologic habitat regions, which became increasingly abundant in number over other types of immune cells.
nerve cells in the toothed back region are able to exhibit a range of secretion-related traits that stem from the interaction between specific genetic structures and the environment (such as the so-called secretion estype), which enhances the activity and supervision of NK cells and ultimately leads to the elimination of NK cells in the aging brain.
the researchers note that immune cells such as NK cells can impair nerve development and cognitive function during normal brain aging, while immunomodulation-targeted immune cells (accumulated in the aging brain) can be used to improve brain cognitive function in aging populations.
researchers say that the accumulation of NK cells in the aging brain or the process by which neurons are formed in the brain, the process by which the nerves occur.
future researchers will also develop new and effective therapies that improve cognitive function in older adults based on the results of this paper.
researchers are optimizing the methods developed in this paper to regulate the immune response in the brain, which they aim to improve cognitive function in the brain in aging populations in the future.
() Original source: Wei-Na Jin, Kaibin Shi, Wenyan He, et al. Neuroblast senescence in the aged brain augments natural killer cell cytotoxicity leading to impaired neurogenesis and cognition. Nature Neuroscience(2020). DOI:10.1038/s41593-020-00745-w