A System Gone Bad – When a Good (Immune) System Does Bad Things
Scientific advances have provided great insights into how the immune system functions. The immune system is a complex network of different functions, which operate together to defend us against infectious agents like bacteria and viruses and helps us recover and repair from injury. A properly functioning immune system does a good job of recognizing potential harmful agents and killing them off; however, when the system is out of balance it can lead to an array of dismay for us.
Confusion Leads to Over-Reaction
If the immune system is put under too much stress, it may lose its ability to differentiate ‘self’ from ‘non-self’ and begin to attack its host, mistaking ‘self’ cells for invading organisms. This can result in debilitating autoimmune diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
The rise of autoimmune diseases results from a loss of what is called ‘immune tolerance’, which is the immune system’s ability to ignore ‘self’ and react to ‘non-self’. When we lose immune tolerance, our immune system loses its ability to discern what it should and should not attack; the reason(s) why this happens is currently a hot topic and there is much research being done in this area. What appears to happen in many cases is that a foreign antigen bears remarkable resemblance to a ‘self’ antigen and the confused immune system attacks the ‘self’ antigen as if it were a foreign invader.
As we talked about in the first post, the adaptive immune system ‘remembers’ this and starts a continual process of attacking the ‘self’ antigens as if they were an invading army. This can cause damage not only to the tissue being attacked, but also the tissues and cells surrounding the target tissue. You can quickly see that this can spiral out of control and cause a lot of damage over time.
Another example of an immune system that may be over-reactive is seasonal allergies. These reactions can result when the immune system mistakes a harmless particle such as pollen for an invading organism. When this happens, it triggers an immune reaction and the production of antibodies. These antibodies migrate to immune cells lining the nose, eyes and lungs and these cells release a whole slew of chemicals that irritate and inflame the moist membranes lining the nose and produce the symptoms of an allergic reaction: scratchy throat, itching, sneezing and watery eyes.
Finally, chronic low level inflammation is another very common indicator of an out-of-balance immune system and can contribute to many diseases, including cancer and cardiovascular disease.
Because of these and other challenges, there is an ever-increasing need to keep the immune system in balance – not just boost it temporarily or suppress it. Natural products have the greatest chance for helping people maintain healthy, balanced immune systems with minimal or no side effects. We’ll cover those in the final installment of this four part series.