by EMILY ANTHES
Nearly two decades ago, Donna Jackson Nakazawa’s immune system launched a misguided attack on her own body. Her white blood cells — which typically fight off invading pathogens — went to war against her nerves, destroying the layer of fatty insulation that helps nerve cells transmit their signals. Nakazawa, a journalist and author, had Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare autoimmune condition that caused muscle spasms and left her temporarily unable to walk.
But alongside these physical symptoms, she also began to feel as though something had gone amiss in her mind. She developed severe anxiety and began experiencing troubling memory lapses, even forgetting how to tie her daughter’s shoes. “I could not shake the feeling that just as my body had been altered, something physical had also shifted in my brain,” Nakazawa writes in her new book, “The Angel and the Assassin: The Tiny Brain Cell That Changed The Course of Medicine.”
At the time, doctors couldn’t really explain what was happening to her. Scientists had long believed that the brain was “immune privileged,” walled off from the peripheral immune system. There wasn’t an obvious way for her overactive white blood cells to be causing her cognitive symptoms.
But over the last decade researchers have made a series of stunning discoveries that overturned this long-accepted dogma. The findings revolve around tiny, long-overlooked brain cells known as microglia, which serve as the brain’s own immune system and turn out to play a critical role in shaping neural circuits. “The Angel and the Assassin” is an illuminating look at these underestimated cells and how they might remake medicine.
Nakazawa writes with refreshing clarity about two extremely complex fields — immunology and neuroscience — and vividly explains what’s at stake, interweaving the stories of the scientists who are shedding light on microglia and the patients whose lives could be changed by their work. As Nakazawa explains, “We stand at the cusp of a sea change in psychiatry: an enormous paradigm shift that cuts across all areas of medicine, and promises to rewrite psychiatry as we know it — based on the novel understanding that microglial cells sculpt our brain in ways that have profound lifelong effects on our mental health and well-being.”
Undark for more