Infection Redirection

The road to recovery can be even harder than an injury’s immediate impact. This is particularly true in the brain where injury can cause long-term disability. Recovery is often much worse in patients who contract infections, but the reasons for this are unclear. A new study examining immune activity in mice with mild traumatic brain injury found that immune cells essential to repair are diverted away during infection. This reprioritisation delays repair to blood vessels in the brain (pictured, seven days after injury with functional blood vessels labelled yellow, and those still damaged in red). Full belated recovery may be possible from mild injury and a single infection, but after severe injury like stroke the speed of repair is essential to preserving brain function. The study, which identified the key signalling proteins involved in redirecting the immune system, emphasises that infection control is central to a full and fast recovery.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Panagiotis Mastorakos and colleagues
• Viral Immunology & Intravital Imaging Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Nature Immunology, September 2021