The neural centers of the reward system act on the immune system so that it does not harm the heart recovering from a heart attack.
It is known that mental state affects the heart, especially if the heart is not very healthy. For example, people with anxiety and depression have a harder time recovering from heart attacks; positive emotions, on the contrary, help the heart. Our emotional state depends largely on the reinforcement system – several neural centers in the brain that make it possible to feel pleasure from a reward, and, as a result, actively participate in learning and motivation.
Employees Technion Israel Institute of Technology suggested that the influence of mental state on the heart is associated with the reward system. In the article in Nature Cardiovascular Research They describe experiments with mice that were given an artificial heart attack. The mice were then stimulated in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), one of the areas that is part of the reward system. Previously, the same researchers found that the ventral tegmental area has a positive effect on immunity: immune cells were twice as effective at killing microbes after stimulation of VTA neurons, and the immune system worked better overall after signals from the reward system.
The immune system senses the death of heart cells during a heart attack and triggers an inflammatory response that should heal the damage. However, too much post-infarction inflammation is bad for the heart muscle, increasing the growth of connective tissue where cells have died. Connective tissue does not conduct electrochemical signals, and the heart with connective tissue patches begins to work worse. The researchers assumed that the beneficial effect of the ventral tegmental area on immunity would have a good effect on the heart. And so it happened: when VTA neurons were stimulated in mice after a heart attack, less connective tissue formed in the heart, blood vessels formed more effectively, and the heart worked better overall than without VTA stimulation. Signals from VTA neurons acted, at least in part, through an immune messenger protein synthesized in the liver.
In mice, the neurons of the reward system were activated directly, but in general there are now methods that allow more or less accurately stimulating a particular area of the brain from the surface of the skull, without surgical manipulations – here we can recall transcranial electrical stimulation, and ultrasound stimulation, and some other methods. But before planning treatment regimens, we need to make sure in clinical experiments that the human reward system – the same ventral tegmental area or some other center – helps the infarcted heart to recover.
Source: www.nkj.ru
