Blog
Were it not for our immune system surveillance, we would all succumb to cancer at a young age. Our immune system not only patrols for invaders from without, but for rogue cells from within that could go cancerous. Our immune system must recognize and destroy these rogue cells before...
A collaboration of researchers evaluated 780,000 immune cells from 130 patients and found different immune responses in those with severe COVID19 disease. The question then becomes one of the chicken or the egg, or in other words, are we seeing a cause or an effect here? With the age...
The field of infectious disease plays out like a war game in which our immune system battles against viruses which each have their own secret weapons to disable or disrupt our defense systems. In the case of COVID, it too possesses various means of sabotaging our defenses in order to gain...
While my recent post about a placental estrogen receptor pointed to the mechanisms by which mom’s systems can protect a developing fetus from inflammation, immune changes during pregnancy can also benefit mom. Medical scientists have long recognized that mothers tend to have milder...
My recent post described a newly identified mechanism by which mom’s placenta protected the developing fetus from mom’s viral infections. Here you can read about how the unhindered interferon pathway leads to major damage during Zika virus infection. This virus creates life...
Although both scientists and parents express relief for the general protection of developing fetuses from the average viral infection, neither have understood the means of protection. While specific infections do evade this barrier and cause harm, the vast majority of viruses are stopped, and...
Even in 2010, we were learning of the critical role of mast cells in immune defenses outside of allergic responses.
N. Dietrich, M. Rohde, R. Geffers, A. Kroger, H. Hauser, S. Weiss, N. O. Gekara. Mast cells elicit proinflammatory but not type I interferon responses upon activation of TLRs by...
Our bodies are turning out to be less machine like and instead much more intricately interrelated as researchers at Washington University School of Medicine uncover more connections between our immune system and our brain’s functions. This should come as no surprise as everyone who...
Studies are constantly linking maternal immune reactions with the future development of their infants. This is a hot area of research for autism. In a study by University of California – Davis researchers, a potential mechanism for the interaction may have been discovered.
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Researchers at the University of Virginia found that blocking a cytokine in lab animals could make them less socially interactive. When they blocked interferon gamma in flies, zebrafish, mice and rats, they became less social. During the experiment, they found increasing levels of...
As a follow up to this week’s post on auto-antibodies against interferons contributing to a more severe case of COVID 19, we glance at other factors leading to more severe disease. Researchers found that patients whose viral load began declining and whose interferon alpha level did...
Turning Off Your Immune System
How to prevent too much of a good thing?
The headlines are filled with the fear of COVID or how to boost your immune system against it. Both deserve time on the air, but sometimes our immune...
