Wound site neutrophil transcriptome in response to psychological stress in young men

Communication between the central nervous and the immune system occurs through chemical messengers secreted by nerve cells, endocrine organs, or immune cells. Psychological stressors can disrupt these networks. We have previously observed that disruption of the neuroendocrine immune system adversely influences a broad range of physiological processes including wound healing. Migration of neutrophils to the wound site is an early event that induces a transcriptional activation program, which regulates cellular fate and function, and promotes wound healing. In this study, we have sought to identify stress-sensitive transcripts in wound site neutrophils. A skin blister model was used to collect wound fluid and wound site neutrophils from four young men, experiencing or not examination stress. Self-reported stress was recorded using the Beck Depression Inventory. Stress decreased growth hormone levels at the wound site and was related to impaired wound healing in all subjects. High density microarray analyses were performed using RNA from wound site neutrophils. Results show that psychological stress had an overall suppressive effect on the neutrophil transcriptome. Of the 22,283 transcripts screened, 0.5% were downregulated whereas only under 0.3% were induced by stress in all four out of four subjects. Functionally, stress tilted the genomic balance towards genes encoding proteins responsible for cell cycle arrest, death, and inflammation. Further effort to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the functional significance of such behavior-genome interaction is warranted.