Microglia react to partner loss in a sex- and brain site-specific manner in prairie voles
“While the peripheral immune system of grieving individuals has received some attention in the human literature…”
With this sentence, Tobias Pohl, Oliver Bosch and colleagues have fulfilled the promise of the Neurobiology of Grief International Network (NOGIN). Through this website, we’ll bring you posts about new research articles and offer insights into proposing and testing mechanisms of grief and loss. We hope to integrate knowledge gained from human and animal models, and bring together in one place the important work that researchers otherwise might miss (or see months after publication).
This sentence in Pohl and colleagues’ Brain, Behavior and Immunity (2021) article brings us novel data on microglial activation (indicating neuroinflammation) after the loss of a pair-bonded vole mate. They discovered that microglial activation differs by region in the two sexes, intriguing because of higher rates of prolonged grief disorder in women. But most important to my eye, there were no changes in peripheral inflammatory markers in the separated voles, unlike the heightened inflammatory response in humans (Fagundes et al, 2019). Since in humans the post-bereavement inflammatory response increases in a graded way with the increase in grief severity, I wonder if this correlation could be seen in voles peripheral inflammatory response and their passive stress coping or other behavioral correlate. Nonetheless, this is a great step forward for the field, since in humans, “insights into the neuroinflammatory response following partner loss are scarce and usually limited to postmortem samples or non-invasive techniques.” (Pohl et al, 2021, p.169). Some grief and loss research can only be done in one species or another, but if we continue to look at mechanisms under different streetlights (a reference to the joke about looking for one’s lost keys where the light is best), we will not gain as much as if the field of grief research works together.
