Central cyclooxygenase inhibition during the course of lung injury attenuates breathing frequency

Ventilatory pattern is a neurally integrated output that is altered by lung injury. Work in our lab has provided evidence that ventilatory pattern changes persist in situ, and are concurrent with elevated IL-1β expression, astrogliosis and altered synaptic efficacy in the nucleus of the tractus solitarii (nTS), a brainstem region critical for viscerosensory integration. Most recently, we observed that microinjection of exogenous IL-1β into the nTS of naive rats evokes some of the ventilatory pattern changes observed during lung injury. Collectively, these findings suggest that lung injury exerts influence over the neural control of breathing in part through the action of neuroinflammation. We therefore hypothesized that inhibiting neuroinflammation during the course of lung injury would attenuate breathing frequency (FR) and reduce IL-β expression in the nTS. To test this hypothesis, we continuously administered either vehicle or indomethacin (IND), a cyclooxygenase-1/2 (COX-1/2) inhibitor, into the right...