Everyone’s familiar with the redness, warmth and swelling that comes with a pulled muscle or sliced finger. That’s your body’s response to injury: inflammation triggered by your natural defense mechanisms, a part of the healing process. But when inflammation persists long after you’ve healed, it can trigger serious diseases that are tough to treat — more than half of all deaths worldwide can be chalked up to chronic inflammation. That’s where vagus nerve stimulation comes in. This groundbreaking treatment may finally offer solutions to deadly conditions — no drugs required.

Through targeted stimulation of the vagus nerve (it helps regulate immunity), researchers are finding that it’s possible to “reset” your immune response and tamp down inflammation. Vagus nerve stimulation falls under the heading of bioelectronic medicine, and is a primary focus of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health.

To better understand how bioelectronic therapies may help to treat patients with a number of different conditions, first it helps to understand how the immune and inflammation processes work within our own bodies.

What is inflammation?

In addition to injury, there are numerous reasons why you might experience temporary inflammation: a fever that fights off an infection, for example, or even lifestyle issues such as stress, an unhealthy diet, poor sleep, and loneliness.

Inflammation becomes problematic when it’s prolonged. There are autoimmune diseases in which the body’s defenses go haywire and attack healthy tissues — think lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. Chronic inflammation can also lead to heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

“Chronic inflammation occurs when the body’s immune system malfunctions and continues to send inflammatory cells to a particular site, even though there is no real threat of disease or injury present,” says Kevin Tracey, MD, president and CEO of the Feinstein Institutes. “Over time, that can actually damage healthy cells and pose a serious threat to your overall health.”

There are involuntary reactions within your body that can cause chronic inflammation, but lifestyle choices can contribute to it as well.

Things like smoking, unhealthy diet, excessive drinking, stress, lack of exercise, poor sleep habits, and obesity all contribute to the presence of chronic inflammation.

Cigarette smoke, for example, not only contains thousands of toxins that trigger a response from your immune system, but similar to eating too much fatty foods or drinking too much alcohol, it also floods your system with unstable molecules known as free radicals, which damage immune cells.

A lack of exercise may lead to obesity, which triggers the fat tissue in your body to release excess amounts of pro-inflammatory cytokines known as tumor necrosis factor-alpha and interleukin-6. The more fat you store and the longer you keep it on, the more chronic the inflammatory response becomes.

The same goes for stress and poor sleep Both are associated with elevated levels of cytokines and a common marker for inflammation and infection known as C-reactive proteins, linked to increased risk of heart disease, arthritis and diabetes, among other conditions.

Making positive, healthy lifestyle changes can reduce chronic inflammation and lower your risk for such serious conditions.

“Our research was the first to indicate that we're very close to a time when millions of patients will benefit from vagus nerve stimulation,” says Dr. Tracey. “Whether it’s from external devices placed on various parts of the skin or tiny stimulators implanted inside the body on the vagus nerve itself, these techniques can be very effective.”

Some bioelectronic therapies are already in use. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first approved vagus nerve stimulation to treat epilepsy in 1997. Today, it’s used around the globe to treat other conditions like depression, chronic pain, migraine and cluster headaches and to aid patients recovering from stroke.

Now vagus nerve stimulation is showing promise in treating inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, bipolar disorder, obesity, and even devastating brain conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

“There is evidence that this may be possible sooner rather than later for a wide variety of conditions and there are hundreds if not thousands of people working on these ideas,” says Dr. Tracey, whose team is in the midst of a first-of-its-kind project to create a comprehensive map of the vagus nerve, aided by a $7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

“This is a historic time because this new approach could treat millions of patients with a variety of conditions,” says Dr. Tracey. "In some cases, bioelectronic therapy could potentially mean a one-and-done surgical procedure that could free patients from years of dependence on expensive, invasive and potentially dangerous drugs to treat their condition.”