Why the study?
Inflammatory diseases in the gastrointestinal tract are frequent and difficult to treat, and the mechanism of the anti-inflammatory effect of vagus nerve stimulation through the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway remains not fully known.
This review highlights the potential of vagus nerve stimulation to modulate inflammation in gastrointestinal diseases via the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway.
Hypothesis-generating for vagus nerve stimulation in human GI inflammation; leaves open clinical translation pending trials.
BACKGROUND: The cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway (CAIP) has been proposed as a key mechanism by which the brain, through the vagus nerve (VN), modulates the immune system in the body. Recent studies of VN stimulation (VNS) in vivo systems have shown that it plays an anti-inflammatory role through CAIP. Inflammatory diseases in the gastrointestinal tract are frequent and difficult to treat. SUMMARY: The mechanism of the anti-inflammatory effect of VNS through CAIP is not fully known. The current review covers anatomy, molecular mechanisms, and the application in gastrointestinal diseases of the vagal CAIP. Key Messages: CAIP bridges immune and nervous systems and plays pleiotropic roles in modulating inflammation in animal models by targeting different immune, proinflammatory, epithelial and endothelial cells, and signaling pathways. Numerous animal studies have shown beneficial effects of stimulation of this pathway in models of inflammatory diseases, either through (electrical) stimulation of the VN or pharmacological approaches. In this review, we focus on the anti-inflammatory benefits of VNS as a means of providing new insights into treating inflammation-related gastrointestinal diseases, as exemplified by those described herein.
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Lei et al. (2019) studied this question.
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