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Research advances of autonomic nervous system in the regulation of cardiac inflammation

FENG Ye-Nan, XIAO Han, ZHANG You-Yi^*

Department of Cardiology and Institute of Vascular Medicine, Peking University Third Hospital; NHC Key Laboratory of Cardiovascular Molecular Biology and Regulatory Peptides; Key Laboratory of Molecular Cardiovascular Science, Ministry of Education; Beijing Key Laboratory of Cardiovascular Receptors Research, Beijing 100191, China

Abstract

The autonomic nervous system consists of the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. These two systems control the heart and work in a reciprocal fashion to modulate myocardial energy metabolism, heart rate as well as blood pressure. Multiple cardiac pathological conditions are accompanied by autonomic imbalance, characterized by sympathetic overactivation and parasympathetic inhibition. Studies have shown that overactive sympathetic nervous system leads to increased cardiac inflammatory reaction. Orchestrated inflammatory response serves to clear dead cardiac tissue and activate reparative process, whereas excessive inflammation may result in pathological cardiac remodeling. Since the discovery of the α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (α7nAChR)-mediated cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway (CAP), the protective effects of the parasympathetic nervous system in cardiac inflammation have attracted more attention recently. In this review, we summarized the role and underlying mechanisms of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems in cardiac inflammation, in order to provide new insight into cardiac inflammatory response in cardiovascular diseases.

Key words: autonomic nervous system; sympathetic nerve; parasympathetic nerve; cardiac inflammation

Received: 2018-08-24　　Accepted: 2018-11-08

Corresponding author: 张幼怡　　E-mail: zhangyy@bjmu.edu.cn

DOI: 10.13294/j.aps.2019.0009

Citing This Article：

FENG Ye-Nan, XIAO Han, ZHANG You-Yi. Research advances of autonomic nervous system in the regulation of cardiac inflammation. Acta Physiol Sin 2019; 71 (2): 225-234 (in Chinese with English abstract).