Duration of the video 03 minutes 24 seconds
Researchers from the University of Linköping in Sweden were able to detect the cells necessary for the onset of fever in the blood vessels of the brain.
The study, conducted in mice, was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) last October, and wrote about the site “Yorick notice(EurekAlert), and answered the question asked a long time ago: which organ is responsible for the fever?
Fever is a higher than normal body temperature that varies from person to person but is usually around 37 degrees Celsius.
Fever is the body’s response to infections
Fever is the body’s response to infection and inflammation and is the body’s way of defending itself against bacteria and viruses.
When the body is exposed to infection or inflammation, it responds by releasing molecules called cytokines into the bloodstream and these molecules are too large to cross the blood brain barrier.
The blood brain barrier is a network of capillaries that protect the brain from substances that can cause brain damage.
The outer surface of the blood brain barrier contains receptors that detect cytokines and these receptors transmit the signal to cells on the inner surface of the blood vessel walls in the blood brain barrier, known as endothelial cells, and then begin to produce a molecule similar to the hormone prostaglandin ” E2 “(E2), which in turn activates receptors in the hypothalamus, which regulate body temperature, triggering a fever. However, it is still unclear whether this is the only mechanism behind the fever.
It was previously thought that prostaglandins must also be produced in certain cells of certain organs such as the liver and lungs to initiate the febrile reaction, but Linköping University researchers have shown that this is not the case, as it turns out that only the cells endothelials of the brain are needed to produce the febrile reaction.
old question
“Our findings answer a question that has been asked for decades. There has never been any evidence that only endothelial cells in the brain are needed to initiate a fever reaction,” says Anders Blomqvist, a professor at Linköping University.
The researchers worked with genetically modified mice, removing some of the genes that code for prostaglandin production in brain endothelial cells, then injecting the mice with substances found in the cell walls of certain bacteria, which produced fever in this way. Genetically modified mice showed no fever reaction after the injection.
This allowed the researchers to conclude that these endothelial cells were needed to cause the fever, but they didn’t seem to be enough.
For this reason, the researchers tested another genetically modified mouse model in which the only cells capable of producing prostaglandin E2 were brain endothelial cells. These mice showed a feverish reaction, confirming that the endothelial cells in the brain were already sufficient.
