Autoimmunity And What It Indicates In Our Immune System
Other than just the immune system attacking itself, what else is there for consideration?
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 (RA), for instance, the immune system sends out its defenders to swarm the joint cartilage and digest away at the joint cartilage. How is that different from osteoarthritis (OA) though?
We’d see that in both cases, there is an inflammatory signal involved. In RA, however, we’re looking at a more intense inflammatory situation, and any available immune defender cell is called to swarm upon and vanquish the big bad monster known as the joint cartilage.
It’s the swarming that’s terribly toxic.
Imagine the panic buying going on in various countries when the news of COVID-19 first hit. There were swarms and throngs of panic shoppers rushing the aisles of supermarkets to stock up on necessities such as toilet paper… leaving none for anyone else.
That’s the kind of swarm that we can visualise in an autoimmune disorder.
The immune defenders are called to swarm upon some unsuspecting, non-threatening thing in the body.
We want them to swarm the foreign invaders and eliminate them. We don’t want the healthy stuff in our body to get touched!
Unfortunately, nobody knows why a malfunctioning immune system can signal the immune cells to swarm other benign objects.
The problem is, when they’re busy swarming something benign…
Then how well can they do their work in swarming the stuff that we actually do need them to swarm?
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.
But we can look at the mechanism behind how an autoimmune disorder develops.
In our body, there are 4 major types of T helper (Th) cells, which are used in defending the body from various threats:
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.
These Th cells form a finite population - any increase in the population of one subtype means that the populations of the other 3 subtypes will be affected.
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. 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.
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.
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, our lifestyle choices are key in determining how optimally our bodies can operate. 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!
Do feel free to check out Nutrients That Support A Healthy Immune System to see how our diet can support the optimal functioning of our immune systems!