Allergies are a very common thing in today's society. Especially around the spring season when flowers, trees, and other plants start to bloom. An allergic reaction can also be produced when someone ingests a certain food that the body rejects and causes the immune system to be hyper responsive to. Scientists have found that there might be a link between allergies and parasites. The study in question that was done, was done on a single type of parasitic worm. In this worm's genome, the scientists found that there is a protein that is responsible to causing the same kind of immune response in humans that is generated from the protein found in pollen released from plants. It is crazy to find out that a parasite might be related to the evolution of our immune systems and why we have developed allergies of centuries of evolution. It seems that having an immune system that is more ready to fight off parasites might be worth the trade off of acquiring allergies.
This idea raises a big question for me though, and that is if it is possible to remove this specific protein from certain foods so that people with food allergies might be able to consume these types of foods. Then again, this study was done more on pollen rather than actual foods. There is definitely more research to be done here but it would be interesting to find out if there is more to allergies than just this protein relationship with parasites.
Here is the article: PLOS. "Allergy is the price we pay for our immunity to parasites." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 29 October 2015. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151029150304.htm.
This was a very interesting article! Hopefully one day I will actually be able to consume some of the things that I am allergic to.
ReplyDeleteFor someone who is not allergic to anything, or has never experienced allergies.... this is actually interesting. I know so many people that get so "sick" from allergies and it sucks they look like they have a cold. Hopefully the researchers are able to figure this out and Claritin won't be needed anymore.
ReplyDeleteI usually don't get sick, except for the occasional stomach virus, but unfortunately I have year-round allergies. I wonder if this is related? That would be kinda neat - I'd definitely prefer a few sneezes every day than get sick a lot.
ReplyDeleteNo one likes allergies, period! Whether they're year round or seasonal, they can be anyone's worst nightmare. I think it's neat that they've found this association with a parasite.Could it altered to food specific allergies or with any foods in general. I think it would be interesting to do a study where a survey goes out to participants to find out what the top 3 or 5 food allergies are and go from there. Have your control group and then have your experimental group......hmmm
ReplyDeleteWhat's surprising is not that the IgE system is involved in both immune response to metazoans and allergic hypersensitivity (we've known this for a dozen years or more) but that there is epitope homology between these metazoans and the BetV1 allergen found in pollen (elucidated in 1998: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2571499).
ReplyDeleteI wonder if this is just a fluke ;)