Scientists Are Developing a Vaccine For PTSD

by Monica Joshi

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has been known to affect thousands of people in North America each year. It can occur post trauma and can affect the ways in which you are able to cope with everyday life. Several new studies have previously linked the immune system and the way the body reacts to stress. Now, researchers are hoping that tweaking a person's immune system could be a way to treat or even prevent conditions like PTSD.

Christopher Lowry from the University of Colorado-Boulder and his colleagues have found a connection between the immune system and stress in mice when they injected them with a common bacterium called Mycobacterium vaccae. They injected them once a week for three weeks to modulate their immune systems.

Lowry claims that:

“I think there’s kind of a frenzy about inflammation in psychiatry right now.”

These mice were then tested against a group of untreated mice by putting both in cages with larger animals. The untreated mice were more timid, and later on they developed stress-based reactions, such as an inflamed colon. Meanwhile, rodents who got the immune system-boosting injection dealt with their aggressors more confidently. They even looked healthier afterwards!

The mice who were injected were also more proactive while the others were simply surrounded and unable to respond.

Lowry's team conducted a second experiment which yielded similar results. In this experiment, they treated rats with the same kind of bacterium. They also kept a control group of rats with untreated immune systems. The researchers trained both groups to associate a particular sound with an electrical shock to the foot. Then, once the rats knew to fear the sound, the researchers began to play the sound without the pain. The treated rats learned not to be afraid much faster than the untreated rats did.

The findings were presented at a meeting of the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society earlier this month. They seem to back up what many scientists have already suspected for a while now: there is a connected between the state of the immune system and mental conditions. While earlier studies had already led up to the same conclusion, they hadn't specifically looked into a possible connection between the state of the immune system and mental conditions, such as depression and PTSD.

The connection, however, has appeared in studies involving members of the military, who are at a high risk for PTSD. Those studies found that soldiers with higher levels of a particular inflammatory protein are at a higher risk of developing PTSD

The important question now is whether these connections observed in rodents can also appear in humans. If so, it remains to be explored whether that opens new avenues for treating mental health via the immune system. As research has already begun for Mycobacterium vaccae vaccine in immunotherapy for allergic asthma, cancer, depression, leprosy, psoriasis, dermatitis, eczema andtuberculosis, it won't be too long now. In addition, University of Manchester's Bill Deakin is about to test whether treating schizophrenia patients with a drug that fights brain inflammation can help to slow the development of the disease.