Scientists may have found the root of anxiety, opening a door to treatment

Scientists may have found the root of anxiety, opening a door to treatment

Emma Betuel

Using a specific class of cells as a target, researchers hope that they’ll be able to develop more precise and effective treatments for anxiety.

A new treatment that could prevent anxiety symptoms may be lurking in a small population of microglia is described in a paper published this week in Cell Reports.

In a series of mouse experiments, scientists at the University of Utah noted that a “lineage” of cells called Hoxb8 microglia had specific effects on anxiety. In mice with dysfunctional Hoxb8 microglia cells, they nervously over-groomed and displayed symptoms similar to human anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, but when these cells were functioning normally, the symptoms abated.

Dimitri Traenkner, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology at the University of Utah, tells Inverse the finding offers biological answer for why people with acute anxiety feel the way they do. The identification of these cells is a big step forward for developing new anxiety treatments.

Scientists may have found the root of anxiety, opening a door to treatment

Emma Betuel

This is very interesting, but the actual results of mouse-developed drugs in humans indicates caution is required in assuming such results will automatically apply to developing effective drugs for humans. There are very many differences in physiology and neurology. From https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shot...-in-people:

"Most potential new drugs fail when they're tested in people. These failures are not only a major disappointment, they sharply drive up the cost of developing new drugs.
A major reason for these failures is that most new drugs are first tested out in mice, rats or other animals. Often those animal studies show great promise.
But mice aren't simply furry little people, so these studies often lead science astray.
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...a drug that works in a mouse often doesn't work in a person. Even so, Preuss says there's tremendous momentum to keep using animals as human substitutes. Entire scientific communities are built up around rats, mice and other lab animals.
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For neurological diseases, Petsko says, scientists might learn more from studying human cells than whole animals. Animals are still useful for studying the safety of potential new treatments, but beyond that, he says, don't count on them.

Preuss at Emory agrees that using animals as models of disease is a big reason that many results in biomedical research aren't readily reproducible."