"At the cellular scale, the way muscle tissue repairs itself becomes surprisingly complex. The body does not respond the same way to all forms of damage. A sudden muscle tear from a sports injury differs greatly from the slow decline in muscle strength seen in conditions such as muscular dystrophy. A research team at Cincinnati Children's has uncovered a shared and unexpected repair process that may help the body recover from several kinds of muscle damage."
"The newly identified mechanism involves macrophages, a type of immune cell. These cells are usually known for acting like tiny cleanup crews that remove bacteria, dead cells, and other unwanted material. 'The biggest surprise about this was finding that a macrophage has a synaptic-like property that delivers an ion to a muscle fiber to facilitate its repair after an injury,' Jankowski says. 'It's literally like the way a neuron works, and it's working in an extremely fast synaptic-like fashion to regulate repair.'"
Certain immune cells called macrophages use a fast, synaptic-like ionic mechanism to aid muscle repair after damage. Macrophages deliver ions directly to muscle fibers in a rapid, neuron-like fashion to facilitate regeneration. The body’s response to injury varies by damage type, from sudden sports tears to gradual declines such as muscular dystrophy, yet this synaptic-like signaling appears to be a shared repair process. Macrophages also release cytokines and chemokines that drive inflammation, influence pain, and promote muscle growth. Targeting this synaptic-like signaling could enable new therapies for injury recovery and muscle-wasting conditions.
Read at ScienceDaily
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