Body's 'super highway,' the vagus nerve, stimulates work of Northwell neurosurgeon Dr. Kevin J. Tracey

For more than 100 years, scientists have tried to unlock the potential of the vagus nerve, sometimes known as the body’s "super highway." Extending from the brain stem, the vagus nerve, which has more than 200,000 individual nerve fibers, carries signals between the brain, heart and digestive system.

Dr. Kevin J. Tracey, a neurosurgeon who heads the Manhasset-based Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health, has spent decades investigating how stimulating the vagus nerve can help bring relief to people with diseases caused by inflammation.

Last year, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration approved a treatment for people with rheumatoid arthritis based on the work of Tracey and his team. Implanted under the skin, the small device sends pulses to the nerve to help reduce the inflammation that attacks joints causing the painful condition.

The FDA previously approved vagus nerve stimulation devices for people with epilepsy, treatment-resistant depression and some rehabilitating from a stroke.

Tracey, who released a book last year, "The Great Nerve," was named in the TIME100 Health list released this week that recognizes the most influential people in health of 2026. Newsday spoke with him about his vagus nerve research and how he hopes it will help even more people in the future.

What triggered your interest in medicine and then specifically neuroscience?

I wanted to be a scientist who could invent things that would be useful. I read biographies of Louis Pasteur and other scientists who made therapies and that just captivated me as far back as I can remember. I chose medical school because I really wanted to understand how the body works. My lifelong interest in being a scientist and my career-long interest in being a neurosurgeon came together in this vagus nerve story.

How did you come to focus on the vagus nerve?

I had spent many years studying inflammation and knew that blocking inflammation held a certain key to making new therapies. We made this surprising discovery that electrically stimulating the vagus nerve blocked inflammation. We were looking at ways of blocking inflammation in the brains of animals with a stroke. We put an anti-inflammatory molecule, a drug, into the brains of these animals, and it stopped inflammation in the brain, which is what we expected. But it also turned off inflammation in the body of the animal and so that was a complete surprise. The drug in the brain was sending signals down the vagus nerve and that's what was switching off the inflammation.

Why is the vagus nerve so important?

It is a fundamental communication system. All the information about the status of all your organs in your body is being fed into the brain through the vagus nerve. This allows your brain to control what's going on in your organs because it responds to the input through reflexes. This is absolutely critical in keeping your organs, your bodily organs, functioning in balance, which is what we call homeostasis and balanced organ function and homeostasis is synonymous with health.

What are some of the challenges treating rheumatoid arthritis and how will this help?

The inflammation primarily affects the joints of the arms and legs, but it can also attack the kidneys, the heart, the brain and other organs. By activating the reflex built into the vagus nerve, it slows down inflammation. That means less pain, less swelling, less redness and better function in the joints.

Whether they are taking steroids, JAK (Janus kinase) inhibitors or biologics, these are powerful drugs that turn down the immune system. But they don't do it in a very careful way. We're trading off the treatment of inflammation with drugs that also cause immunosuppression. The vagus nerve stimulator doesn’t completely turn off the immune system. It uses gentle, small pulsations of electric current that causes the vagus nerve to fire its own signals, resetting the amount of inflammation from a dangerous level to a healthy level.

What do you see in terms of research going forward?

My expectation, based on the data we have today, is that someday this type of therapy will be used in many other conditions. I think you're going to see clinical trials forthcoming for Crohn's disease, for multiple sclerosis, and for other conditions ranging from cancer to heart disease to diabetes and metabolic syndrome. So there's a tremendous interest by many laboratories and many companies in developing these kinds of technologies for these kinds of conditions. What has to happen next is we have to see more clinical trials, each one specific to one of these other conditions. I fully expect that someday hundreds of thousands of people will be treated this way, and I think it's a really important beginning of a new era.

By Lisa L. Colangelo

lisa.colangelo@newsday.com@lisalcolangelo

Lisa joined Newsday as a staff writer in 2019. She previously worked at amNewYork, the New York Daily News and the Asbury Park Press covering politics, government and general assignment.