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Immunometabolism

Feast or famine to combat infection

Nature Reviews Immunology volume 16, page 597 (2016)Cite this article

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anorexia protects mice against sepsis

The authors used Listeria monocytogenes to investigate the role of anorexia in infection. Mice displayed a dose-dependent decrease in food intake following infection, and force-feeding mice with nutrient supplements 8 hours post-infection was lethal. Glucose administration had the same effect and inhibition of glucose metabolism by administration of 2-deoxy-D-glucose (2DG) protected mice from mortality. A similar effect was seen in a lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced sepsis model, in which mortality is only due to a systemic inflammatory response. There was no difference in the magnitude of the inflammatory responses between glucose-treated and 2DG-treated LPS-challenged mice, which indicated that glucose use affects tissue tolerance to inflammatory damage rather than altering the magnitude of the inflammatory response. Furthermore, histopathological analyses of different organs from LPS-challenged mice treated with 2DG and controls were compared to identify any pathological changes including inflammation, necrosis and apoptosis. However, only one difference was found: 2DG-treated LPS-challenged mice had fewer shrunken neurons. Thus, anorexia protects mice against sepsis owing to inhibited glucose use that seems to alter tissue tolerance mechanisms mediated by the brain.

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References

  1. Wang, A. et al. Opposing effects of fasting metabolism on tissue tolerance in bacterial and viral inflammation. Cell 166, 1512–1525 (2016)

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  1. Elisabeth Kugelberg
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Kugelberg, E. Feast or famine to combat infection. Nat Rev Immunol 16, 597 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nri.2016.109

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