Interactions between the brain and the immune system in pain and inflammation

Reciprocal interactions between the nervous and immune systems have gained a lot of attention in the last two decades, especially after demonstrating that cytokine immunotherapies can induce depression and after describing the inflammatory reflex. A lot of effort has been dedicated to understanding how the signals from the immune system reach the brain and vice versa, and on their role in health and disease. However, it is not well-known which of the brain circuits, receptors and signalling molecules give rise to behavioural and affective changes induced by inflammation, such as reduced food intake and induction of negative mood. Moreover, although it is well established that early life stress leads to an increased risk of developing inflammatory diseases in adulthood, the acute effects of stress on the inflammatory response in childhood are not well described. Using mouse models of systemic and local inflammation, I studied (1) how inflammatory pain elicits negative affect, (2) if CGRPα is necessary for parabrachial-amygdaloid pathway-mediated behaviours associated with pain and inflammation, and finally, (3) what are the effects of stress on the inflammatory process during early life. The results indicate that (1) the negative affect of inflammatory pain is triggered by inhibition of serotonergic neurons of the dorsal raphe nucleus, as a result of prostaglandin E2 binding to EP3 receptors; (2) CGRPα is dispensable for most pain- and inflammation-related protective behaviours; (3) acute stress potentiates the pro-inflammatory cytokine expression after an inflammatory challenge in mouse pups. The phenomena studied here can contribute to understanding how immune system activation induces changes in mood and behaviour common for inflammation and depression