Sleep, immunity, inflammation

A September 2022 study by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai said,

• “This study begins to identify the biological mechanisms that link sleep and immunological health over the long-term. It shows that in humans and mice, disrupted sleep has a profound influence on the programming of immune cells and rate of their production, causing them to lose their protective effects and actually make infections worse—and these changes are long-lasting.  This is important because it is yet another key observation that sleep reduces inflammation and, conversely, that sleep interruption increases inflammation,” 

• “This work emphasizes the importance of adults consistently sleeping seven to eight hours a day to help prevent inflammation and disease, especially for those with underlying medical conditions."

• “Our findings suggest that sleep recovery is not able to fully reverse the effects of poor-quality sleep. We can detect a molecular imprint of insufficient sleep in immune stem cells, even after weeks of recovery sleep. This molecular imprint can cause the cells to respond in inappropriate ways leading to inflammation and disease,” 

• “It was surprising to find that not all clusters of stem cells responded to insufficient sleep in the same way. There were some stem cell clusters that proliferated and grew in number, while other clusters became smaller. This reduction in overall diversity and aging of the immune stem cell population is an important contributor to inflammatory diseases and cardiovascular disease.”

Itching, Nervous and Immune Systems

An April 2021 study by Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School said,

"In atopic dermatitis, the itching can be horrific and it can aggravate disease," 

"We began collaborating for two reasons: one is an interest in science -- I wandered into the study of what is now the cysteine leukotriene pathway decades ago, and I've been pursuing it ever since. The second reason is itch -- understanding its cause and connections to neurons."

"As a neuro-immunologist, I'm interested in how the nervous system and immune system cross-talk," 

"Itch arises from a subset of neurons, and acute itch may be a protective response to help us remove something that's irritating the skin. However, chronic itch is not protective and can be pathological. The underlying mechanism that activates neurons and causes chronic itch is not well understood and new treatment is needed."

"The last ten years or so of research in the field of chronic itch have shown the importance and the complexity of the interactions between the immune system and the nervous system," 

"It was very exciting to explore the contribution of cysteine leukotrienes in these neuro-immune cross-talks leading to itch, including in a mouse model of AD."

"The joy of research is doing it for the pleasure of finding out something you didn't know. The immune system is far more complex than we give it credit for. Understanding the involvement of nerves is an immense step forward -- it's been a missing piece in the study of inflammation. In my view, this is immensely important to connect neuroscience with those of us committed to studying inflammation."

Goldenseal and the Immune System

Goldenseal. It’s other names include hydrastis canadensis, orangeroot, yellow puccoon, and bai mao liang,

A March 2021 study by Penn State University looked at the drying process for goldenseal reporting that,

"Three alkaloids -- berberine, hydrastine and canadine -- are recognized as the major bioactive constituents in goldenseal," 

"One important postharvest processing step for goldenseal is drying. However, before this study it was not known how drying temperature influences the concentrations of these alkaloids."

"This work is important because canadine has been found to have significant activity against numerous strains of bacteria, and in previous research it was the only one of the three major alkaloids found to be active against Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus,”

"Also, canadine possesses significant antioxidant properties and has been identified as effective at strengthening the immune system."

Omentum - More

Fascinating that only now some of the benefits and mechanisms of the omentum are being researched and discovered. And it begs the question, “what else don’t we know about this organ?”

“The omentum has been used for its healing potential for over 100 years … Our data demonstrate that the omentum contains at least two groups of cells that support tissue repair, immunomodulatory myeloid derived suppressor cells and omnipotent stem cells that are indistinguishable from mesenchymal stem cells. Based on these data, we propose that the omentum is a designated organ for tissue repair and healing in response to foreign invasion and tissue damage.” (Shah et al, 2012)

 "The progression of chronic kidney disease was slowed due to the continuous migration of stem cells from the omentum to the diseased kidney, resulting in healing of the kidney …Attaching the omentum, a supposedly useless organ lying close to the kidney, to the diseased kidney could be put into practice after some more developmental work … By this technique, patients would be using their own stem cells lying in the omentum to cure their kidneys without depending on outside sources of stem cells." (Garcia-Gomez et al, 2014)

References

Shah S, Lowery E, Braun RK, Martin A, Huang N, Medina M, et al. (2012) Cellular Basis of Tissue Regeneration by Omentum. PLoS ONE 7(6): e38368. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0038368

Garcia-Gomez I, Pancholi N2, Patel J, Gudehithlu KP, Sethupathi P, Hart P, Dunea G, Arruda JA, Singh AK. (2014) Activated omentum slows progression of CKD. J Am Soc Nephrol. 2014 Jun;25(6):1270-81. doi: 10.1681/ASN.2013040387. Epub 2014 Mar 13.