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Science Mag: Microbe that causes food poisoning exerts a sort of mind control over mice

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AndyPR

Senior Member
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2,516
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Guiding the lifeboats to safer waters.
When we have food poisoning, the last thing we want to do is eat. But in mice, a microbe that causes this ailment actually increases appetite, a new study reveals. Researchers say they might be able to use the same trick to increase eating in cancer patients and old folks, who often lose their desire for food.

“I think it’s a fantastic paper,” says immunophysiologist Keith Kelley of the University of Illinois in Urbana, who wasn’t connected to the study. The researchers deserve praise for combining approaches from several disciplines such as microbiology, neurobiology, and immunology to draw a surprising conclusion, he says. “It’s the way disease responses should be investigated.”

Some of the symptoms you endure when you are ill, such as lethargy and fever, are actually good for you. Lolling on the couch all day, for instance, saves energy for your immune cells. But the picture is more complex for another of these so-called sickness behaviors—reduced appetite. Animal studies have found that eating less seems to improve the odds of surviving some infections, perhaps because it robs the invading microbes of key nutrients, but in other cases the loss of appetite often proves fatal.
Click to expand...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017...-poisoning-exerts-sort-mind-control-over-mice

Link to study http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30054-5
 
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Chrisb

Senior Member
Messages
1,051
On a slightly different, but possibly closely related, topic, yesterday's discussion on "All in out time" with Melvyn Bragg on BBC radio 4 (sorry, I'm not up to providing the link at the moment) concerned parasites and included a section on their capacity to change the behaviour of the host.

The possibility did seem to arise that "psychological" factors allegedly causing illness might in some cases be precipitated by parasites.

As the poem goes: "Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite them, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum." I think its Belloc.
 
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