Research project Brain and psychological predictors of the acute response to experimentally induced inflammation

The inflammatory activation also causes an important reorganization of motivational priorities, leading to an overall feeling of sickness malaise, including fatigue, bodily pain, sadness, lassitude, social withdrawal, and anxiety; in short, the infected individual feels sick.

However, there are large differences between individuals in how they feel during an infection. In this project, we are studying sickness responses and the factors that make people more or less vulnerable to feel sick during an infection. We use an experimental safe model consisting in injecting intravenously a bacterial fragment to make participants sick for a few hours. We then investigate how brain morphology and functions, as well as psychological variables, predict sickness responses.

This project will help understand why some individuals suffer more from the deleterious effects of an infection or take longer to recover from an infection. It will also give clues about some of the mechanisms and factors that might render some individuals more vulnerable to develop inflammation-associated depression.

Understanding why some people do not feel sick during an infection is also relevant in a pandemic situation, where infected but asymptomatic individuals can still be contagious.

Project’s full title: Individual differences in the acute response to experimentally induced inflammation: brain and psychological predictors. A randomized placebo-controlled study using experimental endotoxemia in healthy human volunteers.