PIXABAY, KAPA65Male and female mice use different immune cells to process pain, according to a study published this week (June 29) in Nature Neuroscience. Male mice feel pain through cells called microglia, while female mice tend to use T cells, though they will switch to using microglia when they lack adaptive immune cells.
“The finding that microglia are not required for pain sensitivity in female mice is really exciting,” University of Kentucky neurobiologist Bradley Taylor, who was not involved in the study, told The Scientist.
“This is not the usual type of sex difference that people usually report,” said study coauthor Jeffrey Mogil, a pain geneticist at McGill University in Montreal. “It’s astoundingly robust.”
WIKIMEDIA, KHOA PELCZARGlaxoSmithKline’s Pandemrix vaccine for H1N1 has been linked to an increased risk of narcolepsy in children immunized in a 2009 vaccination campaign in Europe. Scientists suspected that something in the vaccine, or perhaps something in the virus itself, was eliciting an immune response that caused the body to attack its own hypocretin pathway, which regulates sleep. Now, researchers have identified a peptide, a portion of the influenza virus nucleoprotein A, found in high abundance in Pandemrix that resembles hypocretin receptor peptide. Moreover, patients who were vaccinated with Pandemrix had high levels of antibodies that bound both the influenza peptide and the hypocretin receptor.
The results, published this week (July 1) in Science Translational Medicine, suggest that the vaccine may spur the production of self-reactive antibodies that leads to narcolepsy. But the virus itself could also be triggering an autoimmune reaction. Indeed, the ...
