Evidence points to the unappealing fact that infection with fecal-dwelling hookworms can protect against a number of inflammatory diseas. The diseases include asthma and allergy, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease and type 1 diabetes.
Scientists are hoping to decipher how these organisms control the immune systems of their human hosts. Once the deciphering exercise progresses sufficiently, the scientists hope to replicate the parasite’s beneficial effect and develop effective therapies for the inflammatory diseases.
Swallowing pig whipworm eggs or deliberately infecting oneself with hookworms are effective. However, these are prospects that even severe allergy sufferers are not likely to accept. Hence the focus on finding out how the hookworms do it and trying to replicate the process through drugs. One scientist feels that the solution might lie in inducing the types of immune responses that chronic worm infections produce.
The rise in alergies and other ailments in rich countries is matched by a decrease in parasitic worm infection, which has been with us for a long time. Such long associations between two organisms, humans and parasitic worms in this case, tend to become mutually beneficial. By eliminating parasitic worm infections, we might be making ourselves vulnerableto immunologic diseases.
Research in animal models designed to mimic these diseases supports these conclusions. Infection with parasitic worms induces the type of allergic response triggered by allergens. This in turn raises levels of an antibody immunoglobulin which, when it binds with specific immune cells in the blood, causes the the cells to dump their contents into the bloodstream triggering allergic symptoms.
In people with parasitic infections, there are lots of immunoglobulins and lots of the cells that cause allergies, and yet they don’t suffer allergies. The mechanism for this phenomenon is not fully clear though one scientist has noticed that worms produce an enzyme that prevents the immunoglobulins from binding with immmune cells (and causing the latter to dump allergy-triggering substances into the bloodstream).
Read more details at TechnologyReview.com.
Tags: allergy treatment, parasitic worms and humans, symbiotic relationship
[...] Fighting Allergies and other Inflammatory Diseases in a Strange … [...]