I'd like to see research done on mice to reduce the number of viruses and bacteria they are exposed to - for example by sterilizing all air, water, and food for many generations. Then see which ailments go away.
but there shouldn’t be gospel.
As a wild guess probably a bit high but viruses like EBV are being increasingly suggested as causative of many autoimmune diseases.
> I'd like to see research done on mice to reduce the number of viruses and bacteria they are exposed to - for example by sterilizing all air, water, and food for many generations. Then see which ailments go away.
May not be the panacea you expect, on the other hand some people think too clean is the problem.
50-90% of the US population are EBV or CMV positive yet it’s a much smaller percentage that develop autoimmune illnesses.
I’m the farthest thing from a rheumatologist but it seems like the favored explanation is a combination of infection and abnormal immune response.
I believe the evidence for autoimmune disorders is much weaker (with the caveat that this is well outside my scope of practice), I’ve heard it being implicated in MS from my neurology colleagues but my understanding is it’s a weak correlation at the moment. I can’t offer more than uneducated conjecture on other autoimmune diseases. UpToDate says the following:
“One difficulty in proving a link between EBV and MS is that serological evidence of EBV can be found in 83 to 90 percent of adults in the Western hemisphere [99,101,102]. On the other hand, EBV seropositivity among adult MS patients is near 100 percent, significantly higher than healthy controls [91,102-106]. Additionally, children with MS are significantly more likely than healthy peers to have serological evidence for prior EBV infection, at an age when EBV seropositivity is much less common than in adults [107]. However, there is conflicting evidence concerning the presence of EBV in brain tissue of patients with MS [108-111].”
same deal
I've been reading into how they establish latentcy and in what cell types. They can infect almost any cell and establish latentcy, they prefer some cells that do not undergo apoptosis, near the brain.
There isn't enough funding in the area either.
A drug to limit cell to cell transfer and a vaccine to prevent new spread to other people.
But those living with the virus, it is unfortunate it will remain in our bodies forever, it is just too clever, hidden deep within our bodies in many cell types and impossible to remove without rna editing.
Not directly. Autoantibodies are the direct cause of many, if not all, autoimmune diseases.
It's possible that certain environmental factors, combined with genetic factors, kickstart autoantibody production. (i.e. are upstream of autoimmune diseases, and causative.) But nobody knows for certain. And the reverse hypothesis is also quite popular: An environment that's too clean, that leaves too little for the immune system to do, can induce a restless immune system into producing autoantibodies. "Idle hands"...
According to Dr. Mate, unresolved emotional stress and trauma can disrupt the body's natural balance, leading to chronic inflammation and an overactive immune response. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the underlying emotional and psychological factors that may contribute to the development or worsening of autoimmune diseases.
Yep, if you read books like 'the body keeps score' and 'the deepest well', the link between trauma and autoimmune diseases AND depression is remarkably high. I'm not saying every case of depression or autoimmune disease is linked to trauma, but wow, is it about as good of a risk factor as smoking is to lung cancer.
> is it about as good of a risk factor as smoking is to lung cancer
I wouldn’t go that far. Smoking has a well understood pathophysiology and extensive evidence as it relates to lung cancer.
Well I had what most would consider to be a perfect childhood and I got Graves Disease at 18 and had to have my thyroid gland fully removed.
So I guess you can count me out of this one.
Modern humans have extremely sheltereled lives compared to our ancestors. Yet, autoimmune diseases seem to be getting more common in modern societies.
How does that differ from Germanic New Medicine? (see https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ryke_Geerd_Hamer)
There is no doubt that stress has physiological effects on body.
I am a big fan of Mate, but I think his ideas are oversold if not by him then by many he has “helped”.
Wouldn't it still be described as autoimmune? An autoimmune disease initially caused by an external agent is still an autoimmune disease.
I suspect that the culprit is much more likely environmental contamination (microplastics, PFAS, etc), which I guess is one thing that you list. But "sterile" is not the solution, and unfortunately we have pretty badly contaminated the whole planet at this point...
For example I had asthma and allergy since forever, but I got colitis ulcerosa for the first time when I was 18 and had final exams in the high school, which decided what university I can go to.
Even asthma attack can be caused by stress alone.
[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/asthma/is-asthma-an-immune...
I jest but I think these tests are still a bit of a mystery (as in why these autoantibodies are made and what their significance is) especially as some people with high titres have no symptoms and vice versa although there is an association.
I think what parent is alluding to is that the trigger for production may be an infection, even if the damage is mediated by one’s own immune system.
[0]for a chuckle this is a humorous but accurate depiction: https://twitter.com/DGlaucomflecken/status/13719013464131174...
A pretty big association I thought
Also what is there exactly to interpret? Or what would a good interpretation look like? I've been to a rheumatologist before and they didn't exactly explain.
A process called V(D)J recombination shuffles and rearranges the genes responsible for encoding the antigen receptors on T cells and B cells. The cells are then tested for compatibility against your own tissue and cells that match your own tissue are deactivated. So new immune cells are essentially created by fuzz testing.
Once deployed, immune cells that find lots of matches clone themselves amplifying their immune effect.
So an autoimmune problem can be as simple as a newly minted immune cell escaping the compatibility testing or just being slightly reactive enough to your own tissue to cause problems while still inactive enough to pass the test.
With that in mind its surprising to me that autoimmune disorders aren't a lot more common!
I base this on the fact that when I moved to a pollution filled city my hair fell out from autoimmune disease, then when I moved out, it stopped happening.
If something is common in the environment and would not cause harm to people if not for disproportionate response from the immune system, I would say that the issue is the immune system, not the common element.
Some diseases have big and obvious effects, while others are undetectable/unknown. Assume that diseases mutate a fixed amount per human they infect.
All 7 billion of those people are one 'pool' for disease spread - as evidenced by covid.
That means that the rate your immune system 'sees' entirely novel diseases - not only novel to you, but also novel to all your ancestors - is 350,000x higher than it used to be. The true figure is probably lower, because many diseases infect multiple species. But still, there is a strong argument that we are asking our immune system to do something far outside what it has evolved to handle.
A disease is a pathological process, something that goes wrong. If someone lives their life without a symptom, they are not diseased.
Your immune system doesn't see "novel diseases", it encounters molecules it doesn't know. These molecules may be pathogenic (i.e. they cause a disease), or they may be harmless. Your immune system reacting disproportionately to harmless stuff, is what's called autoimmune disease.
Autoimmune diseases are diseases in which a body responds to itself. Not to external factors.
Think of it as threat classification errors
You are making wild guesses from a place of ignorance. If you want to learn more about the science of immunology the resources are out there to learn about it.
Clearly that isn't practical for humans, but for mice, it is, and the results of that can inform further research.
There is endless literature on this but the majority of “mainstream medicine” subscribes to the “every kid got sick at once for the first time” theory[0-2].
Anecdotally, I was working at a pediatric hospital for parts of the RSV wave and my conversations with PICU/ER colleagues was condordant with literature in this space.
[0] https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/149/2/e20210...
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147330992...
But it would help the search to find out which viruses/bacteria/pollutants are harming us, and eventually when they are identified they can be eliminated, for example with a vaccine.
The body has a immune reaction against something foreign - however the antibodies created co-react with proteins found in your own body.