Bath arthritis researcher to harness the power of chilli peppers - with the help of local volunteers
A Bath researcher plans to harness the power of chilli peppers to help find out more about the involvement of the nervous system in arthritis.
Dr Nick Shenker, a Research Fellow at the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases, has been awarded a two-year £93,000 fellowship by the Arthritis Research Campaign to carry out the work, which will involve 60 patients from the Bath area.
It is already known that the nervous system plays a role in chronic inflammation, but Dr Shenker aims to show that it may actually cause inflammatory types of arthritis such as rheumatoid arthritis, which affects more than 380,000 people in the UK.
"Rheumatoid arthritis is symmetrical, that is, inflammation of one side of the human body is mirrored in exactly in the same place at the other side, and this could happen because the nervous system uses pathways that "mirror-image" areas of inflammation," explained Dr Shenker. It does this by releasing small proteins called neuropeptides.
He plans to recruit up to 60 people in or around Bath who have recently had some kind of vaccination, which causes an immune reaction resembling inflammation in arthritis.
Vaccination causes a release of neuropeptides at the injection site which leads to an increase in blood flow. To test whether there is a similar release of neuropeptides on the symmetrically opposite side of the body, volunteers will have capsaicin cream - the hot substance found in chilli peppers - rubbed into their arms, which has the effect of artificially stimulating the release of these proteins. Both responses will be measured by a special scanning laser device.
Dr Shenker expects to find that as well as inflammation occurring near the vaccination site on, for example, the left arm, a small area of inflammation will also occur on the right side as part of the mirror-imaging process.
If this strange phenomenon can be artificially reproduced, doctors could then start to intervene in the process, and block the inflammatory activity, and maybe prevent the development of inflammatory arthritis.
