Autoimmune Diseases

[altafhussain198]

Your body's immune system protects you from disease and infection. But if you have an autoimmune disease, your immune system attacks healthy cells in your body by mistake. Autoimmune diseases can affect many parts of the body. These diseases tend to run in families. Women - particularly African-American, Hispanic-American, and Native-American women - have a higher risk for some autoimmune diseases.

There are more than 80 types of autoimmune diseases, and some have similar symptoms. This makes it hard for your health care provider to know if you really have one of these diseases, and if so, which one. Getting diagnosed can be frustrating and stressful. In many people, the first symptoms are being tired, muscle aches and low fever.

The diseases may also have flare-ups, when they get worse, and remissions, when they all but disappear. The diseases do not usually go away, but symptoms can be treated.



I am just reading an article on The Big Myth: Crohn’s is an Autoimmune Disease I don't its that really The Big Myth any one have experience for reading about Crohn's on blog.

 

[waltky]

Does anybody really know what time it is...

Body clock 'alters' immune system
16 February 2012 - Will the time affect medicine?

The time of the day could be an important factor in the risk of getting an infection, according to researchers in the US. They showed how a protein in the immune system was affected by changes in the chemistry of the body through the day. The findings, published in the journal Immunity, showed the time of an infection changed its severity. An expert said drugs were likely to take advantage of the body clock in the near future. Plants, animals and even bacteria go through a daily 24-hour routine, known as a circadian rhythm. Jet lag is what happens when the body gets out of sync with its surroundings after crossing time zones.

It has been known that there are variations in the immune system throughout the day. Researchers are now drilling down into what causes the details. The immune system needs to detect an infection before it can begin to fight it off. Researchers at Yale University School of Medicine were investigating one of the proteins involved in the detection process - Toll-like receptor nine (TLR9), which can spot DNA from bacteria and viruses. In experiments on mice, the scientists showed that the amount of TLR9 produced and the way it functioned was controlled by the body clock and varied through the day. Immunising mice at the peak of TLR9 activity improved the immune response, the researchers said. They said humans with sepsis, blood poisoning, were known to be at a greater risk of death between 02:00 and 06:00.

Time link

When testing mice, the severity of sepsis depended on the time of day infection started and coincided with changes in TLR9 activity. Prof Erol Fikrig, who conducted the study at Yale University, said they had found a "direct molecular link between circadian rhythms and the immune system", which could have "important implications for the prevention and treatment of disease". He added: "It does appear that disruptions of the circadian clock influence our susceptibility to pathogens."

Dr Akhilesh Reddy, who is researching circadian rhythms at the University of Cambridge, said it was "known long ago" that timing had an impact on the immune system, but this was "one of the first forays" into the reasons why. The implications for healthcare could mean that drugs need to be given at certain times of day in order to make them more effective, or drugs could be made which actually target the body clock to put the immune system into its most active phase. Dr Reddy said drug companies were "all switching onto this" and were "now screening drugs at different times of the day". He could see the body clock impacting medicine "within 10 years".

BBC News - Body clock 'alters' immune system

 

[waltky]

Immune system response breakthrough...

Scientists Discover Off-Switch to Regulate Immune System
February 28, 2012 : Scientists have discovered a cellular "off-switch" that could allow doctors to control the body’s immune response in a host of diseases, and could boost the efficiency of vaccines against diseases like HIV and malaria.

The so-called "off-switch" is a protein called TMED7. Researchers at Ireland’s Trinity College Dublin say in normal, healthy cells, the protein calms the immune system after it is done fighting a bacterial infection. Anne McGettrick co-led the study that identified TMED7. She likens the immune system to an orchestra with many different sections, and TMED7 to one of the instruments. It is the first member of a family of proteins to be identified as an important regulator of the immune system. “Why that’s exciting to us is because the more we can tweak just small aspects of our immune system, and the more we understand about how each bit works, the more likely we are to understand what’s going wrong in diseases - why some people get different symptoms - and that when their immune system goes wrong we can work out which pathways are going wrong,” McGettrick said.

Without TMED7 acting as a brake, McGettrick says the immune system would rage out of control after neutralizing a bacterial infection. Researchers knocked out the protein and then infected the cells with a bacterium. They found the cellular immune response became over-activated. McGettrick believes developing drugs, or vaccine adjuvants, that crank up the immune system by removing TMD7 from cells could help boost the effectiveness of vaccines, against HIV and malaria. Vaccines work better when the body's immune system response is robust. “That’s the next avenue that we want to go down to see if knocking out this gene is a candidate for a vaccine adjuvant,” McGettrick said.

The researchers also imaged unaltered cells, and then exposed the cells to a bacterial microbe, to see TMED7 at work. “It allowed the immune system to work for the length of time that it needed to work and then it moved in to do its job [of stopping the immune attack],” McGettrick said. In the case of autoimmune diseases, in which the body’s immune system goes into over-drive and attacks its own tissues, tweaking TMD7 and other immune regulators, according to McGettrick, could lead to treatments to reduce the severity of the attack. An article by Anne McGettrick and colleagues describing discovery of the immune system off-switch protein, TMD7, is published in Nature Communications.

Source

 

[waltky]

Keepin' the immune system healthy...

Species-Specific Microbes May Be Key to Healthy Immune System
June 25`12 : Mice have a jungle of bacteria, viruses and fungi in their stomachs--and so do we. These microorganisms help both mice and us break down dinner. As we are finding, these bugs also help to regulate the immune system. But we are just starting to learn how these tiny organisms influence us and how changing their composition changes us.

In an attempt to find out, postdoctoral researcher Hachung Chung and her colleagues at Dennis Kasper's Lab at Harvard Medical School tried raising mice with exclusively human gut microbiota.

The human microbes did pretty well in the mice guts (the researchers could tell by culturing fecal pellets from these mice). Interestingly, though, the mice with these microbes did not: their immune systems remained underdeveloped. Even when researchers gave rat microbiota to mice, the mice's immune systems failed to mature. The results were published in the June 22 issue of Science.

The findings are "perhaps the most definitive that I've seen," says Eugene Chang, a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the new study. They show "the critical and specific relationship between host and gut microbes, which is needed for proper development of the host immune response," he says.

The results support the thinking that we humans have coevolved with our microbes--and we're probably not the same without them. "The selection of partners is not by chance," Chang says. And that might explain why as we alter our microbiomes--with antibiotics and superclean upbringings--our immune systems have been changing as well, ushering in increasing rates of autoimmune conditions such as allergies and diabetes. "The consequence is that the balance between us and our microbes, determined through evolution, is upset in ways that impact our health and increase risk for many diseases that were previously uncommon," he notes.

Starting germ-free

 

[sherylbrane]

Your body's immune system protects you from disease and infection. But if you have an autoimmune disease, your immune system attacks healthy cells in your body by mistake. Autoimmune diseases can affect many parts of the body. These diseases tend to run in families. Women - particularly African-American, Hispanic-American, and Native-American women - have a higher risk for some autoimmune diseases.

There are more than 80 types of autoimmune diseases, and some have similar symptoms. This makes it hard for your health care provider to know if you really have one of these diseases, and if so, which one. Getting diagnosed can be frustrating and stressful. In many people, the first symptoms are being tired, muscle aches and low fever.

The diseases may also have flare-ups, when they get worse, and remissions, when they all but disappear. The diseases do not usually go away, but symptoms can be treated.



I am just reading an article on The Big Myth: Crohn’s is an Autoimmune Disease I don't its that really The Big Myth any one have experience for reading about Crohn's on blog.

Yeah ! Heard of this kind of disease, It arises from inappropriate immune response of the body. They attack on their own body too. As per doctors reports, they can cure symptoms of disease but cannot cure the disease itself.

 

[waltky]

Genetic research into autoimmune diseases...

Scientists Pinpoint Genetic Origins of More Than 20 Autoimmune Diseases
October 29, 2014 ~ Scientists have discovered genetic links that could put them closer to finding better treatments for a range of diseases, including multiple sclerosis, juvenile diabetes, lupus and arthritis.

Their genetic research has led to a road map pinpointing the origins of 21 such autoimmune diseases. The disorders are caused when the body’s immune system that is supposed to protect it, mistakenly attacks healthy tissues or organs. The genetic blueprint resulting from this research could lead to the discovery of drugs that target more than one disease. Researchers have identified as many as 100 autoimmune diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people around the world. Of these, the biological underpinnings of 21 common diseases have now been identified.

Autoimmune diseases tend to share certain biological characteristics and may cluster together in patients. So says David Hafler, chair of the department of Neurology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “This provides a glimpse of why the diseases are shared. In fact, thyroid disease and diabetes often go together. Rheumatoid arthritis and lupus go together, and MS and Crohn’s disease go together. And this is because of the shared genetic structure,” says Hafler. Writing in the journal Nature, Hafler and colleagues from Massachusetts General Hospital, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's and Harvard University’s Broad Institute unveil a genetic blueprint, identifying the origins of almost two dozen autoimmune diseases within the vast human genome.

A researcher injects DNA material onto a laboratory dish.

‘A non-biased road map’

Hafler says the findings do not yet help doctors diagnose specific diseases, but could eventually lead to effective treatments. “I think the most important part of these findings is...finally having a molecular understanding of each autoimmune disease - more important, a non-biased road map of what we should be targeting,” says he. Hafler says there are some 300 to 400 known genetic variants involved in causing autoimmune diseases that are spread out across the entire human genome. He says the disease-causing genes tend to be located near regions that are important for regulating immune function and give them a lot in common. “What’s become very clear is that these autoimmune diseases do very, very much share a genetic variation together and really cluster together as one autoimmune disease. So, they are very similar and share perhaps 20, 30 percent of identity of a genetic variance, but they're also different,” says he.

Hafler explains there are two types of genetic disease - one where there is a mutation in a particular gene, such as in the case of muscular dystrophy, that causes the disorder. Most autoimmune diseases, however, are a complex blend of normally helpful genetic variants that all people carry but in some individuals, result in illness. Hafler says because some of the illnesses share the same biological pathways, it may be possible to develop or uncover existing drugs to treat more than one autoimmune condition. The blueprint pinpointing the genetic origins of autoimmune diseases, according to Hafler, will be made available to scientists around the world to help them further understand and find treatments for these difficult and often debilitating conditions.

Scientists Pinpoint Genetic Origins of More Than 20 Autoimmune Diseases

See also:

Global Infection Outbreaks Rise over Past 30 Years
October 29, 2014 ~ Global disease outbreaks are on the rise, according to a new study, but fewer people are becoming infected. The communicable illnesses range from the exotic, including the current Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa, to more common strains of influenza, hepatitis and tuberculosis.

There have been more than 12,000 outbreaks around the world since 1980, affecting 44 million people. The findings are based on information reported to the Global Infectious Disease and Epidemiology On-Line Network, or GIDEON, an international database that keeps track of outbreaks. It stores information on 215 infectious diseases in 219 countries. Outbreaks of disease that are quickly identified can be treated immediately and people who are suspected of being infected can be quarantined if necessary. While the number of outbreaks is going up, the good news, according to Sohini Ramachandran, is fewer people are becoming infected today than in the past, "which might indicate that we are getting better as a society at large in preventing the spread of outbreaks once they start or identifying outbreaks rapidly."

A Brown University biostatistics expert, Ramachandran conducted the assessment of GIDEON data along with several colleagues. Their results were published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Most of the diseases reported to GIDEON, according to Ramachandran, first infected animals, then jumped the species barrier to humans. That is the case with the swine and avian flus and, most recently, the Ebola virus, which is thought to have originated in fruit bats. “When animals are kept in really tight quarters with other animals, anything that is pathogenic among them can spread very rapidly. And then when humans are nearby, that pathogen can be transmitted to a human host," she said.

A Philippine health worker assists a colleague with protective suits and equipment during the "One Nation, One Direction for EBOLA Prevention" training at the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine hospital in Alabang, Muntinlupa, south of Manila

Ramachandran says increasingly dense population centers are setting the stage for a rise in unique disease outbreaks. Researchers were also curious to learn if global warming was causing a rise in the number of infections. Ramachandran says it does not appear so. “We are experiencing a more rich type of set of pathogens as a human species. But overall the burden of infectious disease outbreaks has been decreasing in the recent past," she said.

The top 10 animal-transmitted diseases between 2000 and 2010 were salmonella, E. coli, influenza A, hepatitis A, anthrax, dengue fever, dysentery, tuberculosis, chikungunya and trichinosis. So-called zoonotic diseases, according to the report, accounted for 56 percent of all disease outbreaks since 1980. Examples of human-specific infections included cholera, measles, mumps and typhoid. The study analyzed data collected between 1980 and 2013.

Global Infection Outbreaks Rise over Past 30 Years