Autoimmune Alert! Friendly Fire Attacking Meself!
The stings from an autoimmune disorder can be highly alarming
I have been talking a fair bit about the immune system in a few health-related posts previously. I did touch on a little bit about autoimmune conditions, but I have not provided a full analysis of it yet.
We do know of the autoimmune disorder as a situation where the immune system is misdiagnosing some healthy cell or structure in the body as a fearsome invader, and then it proceeds to terminate those cells with extreme prejudice.
In Type 1 diabetes, for instance, the immune system sends out its defenders to terminate the lives of the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. As a result, a person with Type 1 diabetes will often be short on insulin, and therefore has to live with regular insulin injections from then on.
In rheumatoid arthritis, for instance, the immune system sends out its defenders to swarm the joint cartilage and digest away at the joint cartilage. These attacks will result in the degeneration of joint cartilage, and as a result one will see a more rapid onset of joint degeneration as compared to osteoarthritis, as I have compared in What The Deuce Is Different Between Osteoarthritis and Rheumatoid Arthritis?
Why does the immune system attack healthy body parts?
The sad thing is, nobody really knows. We don’t even know what can precipitate this attack. As I explain in The Implications Of An Allergic Reaction On Our Health, there are 4 major types of Th cells:
- Th1, which deals with bacterial and viral invasions.
- Th2, which deals with parasite invasions.
- Th17, which deals with fungal and bacterial invasions.
- Treg, which balances out the signalling intensity from Th1, Th2 and Th17.
While we do need some level of Th17 activity to deal with external invaders, excessive Th17 cell activity is “involved in the disease progression of many autoimmune and inflammatory disorders”, as highlighted in this article. These Th17 cells originate from naïve CD4+ Th cells in the bone marrow and will differentiate into “specialised” Th cells, depending on the prevailing biochemical signalling tendencies.
Retinoic acid-related orphan receptor gamma t (RORγt) is the “key transcription factor that orchestrates the differentiation” of the naïve CD4+ Th cells into Th17 cells. RORγt
induces transcription of the genes encoding IL-17 and the related cytokine IL-17F in naïve CD4+ T helper cells.
The Th17 cells are responsible for producing the interleukin-17 (IL-17) family of pro-inflammatory cytokines, which can induce and upregulate pro-inflammatory pathways in the body to bring about a highly pro-inflammatory signal, which proceeds down the line in a signalling cascade to bring about various types and forms of autoimmune disorders.
Another factor that can contribute to excessive Th17 is interleukin-23 (IL-23), as the IL-23/IL-17 axis for autoimmune disorders has also been well documented.
The anti-inflammatory interleukin-10 (IL-10) cytokine that is produced by Treg cells balances out the IL-17 and IL-23 activity, hence an underproduction of IL-10 or a reduced differentiation of naïve CD4+ Th cells into Treg cells can also be problematic.
Because there are so many potential areas that could go wrong in this sequential process, we can’t really tell where to start or what went wrong in the development of an autoimmune disorder. As I do explain in On The Concept of Genetics, And What It Entails In Our Lives, the DNA strands that our parents passed down to us via the sperm and the egg cells could have had problems in replication or the copying mechanism, which then resulted in us having defective genes, which ended up with our cells not producing the right proteins or biomolecules that have the right levels of activity that we need to stay healthy. DNA replication defects would have a big impact on the acquisition of genetic disorders.
But what we do know is that excessive IL-17 activity can contribute to the development of autoimmune disorders, though we don’t know where exactly this excessive IL-17 activity stems from.
Are we born with it, or can we get more in later stages of life?
In some situations, the faulty replication mechanism causes one to be born with an autoimmune condition, and that is not likely to be rectified at all. Hence, children who are diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, for instance, have to rely on insulin jabs for the rest of their lives.
However, we do see situations where people can contract multiple autoimmune conditions throughout the course of their lives. Seemingly “healthy” people can also end up developing autoimmune conditions, which is also a problem. Unhealthy
It is easier to understand why, though. Th17 activity can also be promoted by interleukin-1 beta (IL-1β), which is a major player in mild chronic inflammation. We do see the hands of IL-1β at work in situations such as:
If one is experiencing a chronic degenerative condition, their likelihood of developing an autoimmune disorder later on in life can be increased significantly.
Many of the biochemical processes in our bodies are sequential processes — it is a chess game as to how we really want to protect them. As it stands, there are at least Four Ways That Our Lifestyle Affects Our Immune System. The strategy is key. Leaving our bodies to degenerate with poor lifestyle choices can only hasten the development of more diseases.
When reading it on this screen, it doesn’t sound like it amounts to much, especially if we’re healthy.
But if we are experiencing this condition, how much physical, mental and emotional pain is there in our life? How much financial costs will there be for constant medical checkups?
Unfortunately, if we are born with an autoimmune condition, it is difficult to reverse it. But the logic of living a healthy lifestyle still applies — living a lifestyle that reduces the rate of our body’s degeneration is equally applicable to everyone!
Joel Yong, PhD, is a biochemical engineer/scientist, an educator and a writer. He has authored 1 ebook (which is available on Amazon.com in Kindle format) and co-authored 6 journal articles in internationally peer-reviewed scientific journals. His main focus is on finding out the fundamentals of biochemical mechanisms in the body that the doctors don’t educate the lay people about, and will then proceed to deconstruct them for your understanding — as an educator should. Do visit his website here to connect.