Dementia Japan31:265-273, 2017

Regulation of immune cell gateways in organs and a dementia including Alzheimer's diseases

Yasunobu Arima, Daisuke Kamimura, Masaaki Murakami

Division of Molecular Neuroimmunology, Institute of Genetic Medicine, Graduate School of Medicine, Hokkaido University

Inflammation is a host defense reaction protects the body from invading pathogens, but its unnecessary persistence leads to various diseases as chronic inflammation.  Since the accumulation of immune cells in target organs is an important step in the inflammatory reaction, understanding how the immune cells in the blood infiltrate organs and induce local inflammation is important for clarification of illness with chronic inflammation.  In particular, in the central nervous system, due to the presence of the blood-brain barrier, the infiltration of immune cells is controlled more strictly than other organs.  Therefore, it has been a major research topic how immune cells invade in the central nervous system during inflammation.  Currently, it is also reported that inflammation is greatly involved in pathological conditions in dementia including Alzheimer's disease, and the mechanism of immune cell accumulation in this disease attracts researchers' attention.  In this paper, we explain the mechanisms of immune cell invasion from the blood into the organs, including findings of the nerve stimulation-induced gateway control mechanism and inflammation inducing mechanism, which we recently discovered.

Address correspondence to Dr. Masaaki Murakami, Division of Molecular Neuroimmunology, Institute of Genetic Medicine, Graduate School of Medicine, Hokkaido University(Kita-15, Nishi-7, Kita-Ku, Sapporo 060-0815, Japan)