ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the work relating especially to substance P, since the subject given was mast cell and basophil activation—presumably in the context of neuropeptides in the respiratory tract. Dahinden has shown that nerve growth factor also has the same priming effect on human basophils. A significant earlier literature that does indicate the likely role of mast cells in antidromic electrical stimulation of the rat saphenous nerve, which stands in contradiction to the recent work. The conditioning stimulus alone was able, in this set of experiments, to elicit mast cell degranulation, as evidenced by the release of an enzyme marker found only in rat intestinal mucosal mast cells. The chapter concludes that the brain, either directly or indirectly, was able to cause degranulation of peripheral mast cells. Although it prefers to explain this as a result of direct communication between mast cells and nerves, there is no direct evidence for or against this hypothesis.
