O.K., so it doesn’t quite rank up there with unraveling the cause of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. But with mosquito and poison-ivy season on the way, plenty of folks would be grateful for an answer to a more mundane question: What is the neurological basis of the pruritic response? Or in plain English: Why do we itch?
At least part of that mystery has now been solved by scientists at one of the less celebrated units of the National Institutes of Health. Writing in Science, molecular biologists working at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research report that a molecule known as neuropeptide natriuretic polypeptide b (Nppb) that is released by nerve cells far from the actual itch site triggers an electrochemical cascade that ultimately tells the brain it’s time to get scratching.
“This is an important breakthrough,” says Sarah E. Ross, a neurobiologist at the University of Pittsburgh. It was also, says the report’s senior author, Mark Hoon, “really fun work. It was like a roller coaster of discovery.”
That may sound a little over the top when the subject is
Read the rest of this article on Time: Solved! The Mystery of the Maddening Itch
