The Neuroimmune Switch

“Brain fog is not in your head in the dismissive sense. It often traces back to inflammation in the brain — and inflammation is something we can study with signal.”

— Nev Zubcevik, DO, Co-founder & Chief Medical Officer

Talk to enough patients with long COVID, lingering Lyme symptoms, or chemotherapy-related cognitive decline, and a common thread emerges. Across long COVID, Lyme disease, autoimmune encephalopathy, chemo-related cognitive changes, and post-concussion syndromes, there is a shared driver: neuroinflammation — inflammation in the brain itself. Recognizing that common thread reframes a set of seemingly unrelated, hard-to-treat conditions as variations on a single underlying problem.

What gives me hope is a second reframing. The neuroimmune system is electrical as well as biochemical. If part of the dysregulation is electrical, then it may be reachable with signal — not as a replacement for medicine, but as a tool where drug options are limited.

Proposed mechanisms

The proposed mechanisms for PEMF in this setting are coherent with how neuroinflammation works. They include modulation of microglia (the brain's resident immune cells), suppression of inflammatory cytokines, effects on nitric oxide and blood flow, and rebalancing of the autonomic nervous system. I keep these in the language of study and proposal, because that is the honest state of the evidence — promising directions, not finished proof.

An illustration of inflammation in the brain. “The conversation between the nervous and immune systems may be one of the most important dialogues in medicine.”

— Nev Zubcevik, DO, Co-founder & Chief Medical Officer

The potential beneficiaries are exactly the groups our current toolkit serves least well: people with long COVID, post-viral encephalopathy, chemobrain and chronic fatigue, certain mood and PTSD-related conditions, and early neurodegeneration. These are populations that often hear “there is not much we can do.” A new, evidence-driven option would matter enormously to them.

A platform built to learn

The concept here is Electrome's closed-loop PEMF platform: HRV monitoring, optional EEG and eye-tracking, AI-driven waveform optimization, and EHR integration. Practically, that means a system that senses, adapts, and records — so that therapy can improve with use and clinicians can see what is actually happening.

“Where two systems meet, there is usually a switch. Finding and understanding those switches is the engineering opportunity.”

— Erik A. Nilsen, PhD, Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer

The dialogue between the nervous and immune systems is one of the most exciting open areas in medicine, and studying PEMF as a way to modulate those circuits is a serious, long-horizon undertaking. For the patients caught in the gap where drugs fall short, it is a direction worth pursuing with rigor.

A person experiencing a headache.