Over the last month, I have looked at some key strategies for living well.
The focus of this posting is understanding the impact of stress in various ways and strategies to lower the impact.
Let”s take another look at the vagus nerve.
More on the Vagus Nerve. ( see January 2017 for the first article) Treating Rheumatoid arthritis with vagal nerve stimulation.
This is from an article July 5, 2016, in the journal PNAS Early Edition
Stimulating the vagus nerve with an implantable bioelectronic device significantly improved measures of disease activity in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). This is quite a remarkable idea linking stress with autoimmune dysregulation.
This study was conducted in Amsterdam. The vagus nerve targeted the “inflammatory reflex” and this blocked signals leading to a reduction in the production of inflammatory cells and of an important inflammatory mediator, tumour necrosis factor (TNF) and other inflammatory cytokines.
There was a direct correlation between vagus nerve stimulation and the suppression of the inflammatory proteins and a reduction in signs and symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis.
Once the device was implanted in the 17 patients with active RA they each received electric current pulses (up to 2.0 mA maximum) from 0 to 4 times per day.
Electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve significantly improved all scores of disease activity. Now non-invasive ways of stimulating the vagus nerve are being developed.
This is exciting news.
