Sick and detached: Does experimental inflammation impact on movement synchrony in humans?

Interpersonal connectedness is a central feature of human interaction that can be compromised during illness. Nonverbal signals play a crucial role in this context, and humans, like other animals, have evolved a behavioral immune system that enables individuals to detect subtle cues of sickness in others. Conversely, sick individuals often tend to avoid social interaction, a key component of sickness behavior.

The effect of live-performed music therapy with physical contact in preterm infants on parental perceived stress and salivary cortisol levels.

Introduction: Parents of preterm infants face a stressful life event which might have long term impact on the parent-child relation as well as on the infant's cognitive and socio-emotional development. Both music therapy (MT) and physical contact (PC) are stress-reducing interventions for parents and preterm infants on the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Meanwhile, especially close PC is considered as standard care (SC) in most NICUs.

Acute hypoxic conditions preceding endotoxin administration result in an increased proinflammatory cytokine response in healthy men.

Tissues often experience hypoxia at sites of inflammation due to malperfusion, massive immune cell recruitment, and increased oxygen consumption. Organisms adapt to these hypoxic conditions through the transcriptional activation of various genes. In fact, there is significant crosstalk between the transcriptional responses to hypoxia and inflammatory processes.

Investigations on the Ability of the Insular Cortex to Process Peripheral Immunosuppression.

The brain and immune system communicate through complex bidirectional pathways, but the specificity by which the brain perceives or even remembers alterations in immune homeostasis is still poorly understood. Recent data revealed that immune-related information under peripheral inflammatory conditions, termed as "immunengram", were represented in specific neuronal ensembles in the insular cortex (IC). Chemogenetic reactivation of these neuronal ensembles was sufficient to retrieve the inflammatory stages, indicating that the brain can store and retrieve specific immune responses.

Disease-specific alterations in central fear network engagement during acquisition and extinction of conditioned interoceptive fear in inflammatory bowel disease.

Interoceptive fear, which is shaped by associative threat learning and memory processes, plays a central role in abnormal interoception and psychiatric comorbidity in conditions of the gut-brain axis. Although animal and human studies support that acute inflammation induces brain alterations in the central fear network, mechanistic knowledge in patients with chronic inflammatory conditions remains sparse. We implemented a translational fear conditioning paradigm to elucidate central fear network reactivity in patients with quiescent inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), compared to patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and healthy controls (HC).