Virtual reality could train our bodies to fight infection, study says
Your body doesn't wait for illness to strike before gearing up for battle. Just being around sick people can activate your immune system – even if they aren't real, a new study has found.
A Swiss research team used virtual reality (VR) in a study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, to test people's biological responses to potential health threats. They say VR could be a promising complement for other immune-boosting tools, like vaccines.
During the experiment, researchers connected 248 healthy young people to machines that measure brain activity, then donned VR headsets that brought them to a virtual world full of sick people. Some of the avatars had visible infections, such as rashes or coughs, while others either looked afraid or had neutral expressions.
When the sick avatars got very close to the participants, their brains lit up in ways they didn't when the neutral or fearful faces approached. Specifically, the avatars activated the so-called salience network, or the parts of the brain that mainly detect 'salient stimuli, including threats,' the study found.
Blood samples from people exposed to sick avatars also showed a spike in innate lymphoid cell activity, which is a key part of the immune response. These cells are activated by pathogen threats, helping the body to quickly mount a response.
The body reacts similarly to a real infection, such as a flu vaccine.
'We were thinking if anything, [the reactions would be] something very mild,' Dr Camilla Jandus, one of the study's authors and an immunologist at the University of Geneva, told Euronews Health.
'To see cell changes within a few hours, we really didn't expect that'.
The findings suggest our brains can detect potential threats from infections before we even make contact with a sick person, kicking our immune systems into a defensive mode, the researchers said.
'When the infectious threat is entering our body, the immune system reacts, but often it's too late,' Jandus said. 'We see this detection of something that is virtual as an alerting system that … might trigger, in an anticipatory manner, your immune system'.
Researchers don't know exactly how the brain and the immune system work together to combat pathogens, or whether the VR-prompted immune response would be as robust and long-lasting as one elicited by a vaccine.
But their findings seem to fit in with previous research suggesting the body acts as a 'smoke detector' that responds to potential health threats that turn out to be false alarms. Anxiety, inflammation, pain, vomiting, cough, and diarrhoea can all be protective responses.
The study is among the first of its kind, so researchers on bigger groups would be needed to confirm the findings.
Jandus' team is testing whether people's immune systems react differently to VR scenarios that feature the threat of bacteria or viruses.
They also want to study whether VR environments might help bolster people's immune response to vaccines, and whether these settings could help serve as a kind of exposure therapy for people with allergies.
That way, when people are actually infected with an allergen or virus, 'you have already anticipated and prepared your body to react, with the hope to have better success in the response,' Jandus said.
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