The Role of Immune Components in Psychiatric Disorders

The role of the immune system for organizing and regulating the CNS has only recently gained attention from neuroscientists, although there have always been pioneers into this area. The consequences of the intricate collaboration between immune system and CNS may be large, and now appears to be a new strategy for diagnosis, prevention and treatment of major psychiatric disorders, including mood disorders, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorders, autism spectrum disorders, etc. This Research Topic summarizes recent progress into the area of immune-psychiatry exploring the interaction between environmental (infections, stress, pollutants) and genetic (HLA, Complement, TLR) risk factors to induce brain and peripheral inflammation, activation of immune cells, increased gut and blood-brain barriers, dysbiosis, production of auto-antibodies across a broad array of psychiatric disorders. This expanding field can be explored both in pre-clinical models such as the Maternal Immune activation model and in humans using brain imaging markers, blood based biomarkers such as cytokines, infectious stigma, auto-antibodies and/or with metagenomics, epigenome, transcriptome, etc.
This Research Topic will help to better describe the associated subgroups with immune dysfunction, the mechanisms underlying the immune dysfunctions in order to start delineating how immune-based treatment will be used opening up the way to precision medicine using strategies such as probiotics, immune-modulatory treatments, and immune cell based therapy.