4 ms·
When I was in school, allergens were taught as follows (This also explains why people presumed it would fail): 1) Your body "sees" this, meaning it has antibod
by alextheparrot 9y ago
When I was in school, allergens were taught as follows (This also explains why people presumed it would fail):
1) Your body "sees" this, meaning it has antibodies that react to it
2) Cells whose antibodies are activated replicate, as they are recognizing something that is, to the body, presumably foreign and bad
3) Because you now have more cells after the originals replicated, the effects of the allergy worsen as you are now more reactive than before
I'd be interested to see some tests on this. I have a few hypothesizes that we could test:
1) If the children are still reactive to immunological tests (Meaning they still have the antibodies!), are those antibodies being blocked by another compound, another cross-reactive antibody? Another idea is that the actual immune response to antibody activation (Recognizing peanuts) might be handled differently within the cells that produce the actual response to the allergen (Swelling and stuff).
2) If the antibodies no longer exist, I would start looking in the areas where immune cells develop to see if cells producing reactive antibodies to the allergen are being killed off during development (This process is also why you don't kill yourself with antibodies recognizing yourself). If that isn't the case we need to track individual immune cells over the course of treatment.
- mljoe 9y agoIgG is usually implicated in fighting off pathogens like viruses and bacteria. It doesn't typically cause an allergic response. IgE is usually implicated in fighting off pathogens like parasitic worms or mosquito bites. It's the antibody that regularly get confused and binds to peanut proteins and pollen. There is speculation on why the IgE mediated immune response gets confused. One hypothesis is IgE evolved much more recently and "needs more work". The immune response to IgE binding is intense. Allergic reaction is an IgE response to a harmless antigen. However, IgE can be downregulated by repeated exposure to the antigen in question. If the body uses IgE too much (eg. from repeated exposure), it starts to replace IgE antibodies with the more subtle IgG antibodies. The immune system is very fascinating really. IgE might be the key to effective cancer immunotherapy. Imagine if we could program your immune system to fight a cancer as intensely as it fights a pollen grain or peanut in an allergic individual. There is a lot of research in this area these days.
- alextheparrot 9y agoI was unaware that IgE producing B cells transform to IgG after repeated exposure. My previous understanding was that IgE production was a terminal state and responded similarly to increased antigen on IgG presenting Bcells. The hygiene hypothesis makes a good bit more sense now, given that transformation. Thanks for clarifying that.