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Breathing, humming, and sighing stimulate parts of the vagus nerve, but none selectively targets it like an implanted electrode.
In animals, vanishingly small amounts of CNI-1493 in the brain shut down body-wide inflammation through the vagus nerve.
An implanted vagus-nerve stimulator significantly improved about 80% of rheumatoid arthritis patients who had not responded to drug therapy after one year.
SetPoint Medical’s device is about the size of a multivitamin, implanted in the left neck, and activated for one minute daily.
Instead of putting an anti-inflammatory drug into the brain, researchers proposed placing an electrode on the vagus nerve.
New vagus-nerve stimulators are FDA approved for rheumatoid arthritis, including patients who do not respond to available drugs.
Saying a behavior affects “the vagus nerve” misses the crucial detail: individual vagal fibers have distinct, selective functions.
Near the spleen, vagus-nerve chemicals act on immune cells and turn off cytokine production by white blood cells.
The FDA approved vagus-nerve stimulation therapy in the 1990s to treat epilepsy.
Implanted stimulation benefited about half of patients in epilepsy studies, but its mechanism remains unknown for epilepsy and depression.
Vagus-nerve stimulation is being studied for cancer, diabetes, obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis, heart disease, and stroke.
A device that seemed effective in five or ten people is not evidence on the level of a large randomized controlled study.
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