#immune system

[scopnotes]

Learn your (modified) white blood cells!!

Nov (Basophil) belongs to @surinnit

[mindblowingscience]

Playing through the greenery and litter of a mini forest's undergrowth for just one month may be enough to change a child's immune system, according to an experiment in Finland. When daycare workers rolled out a lawn, planted forest undergrowth (such as dwarf heather and blueberries), and allowed children to care for crops in planter boxes, the diversity of microbes in the guts and on the skin of the young kids appeared healthier in a very short space of time. Compared to other city kids who play in standard urban daycares with yards of pavement, tile, and gravel, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds at these greened-up daycare centers in Finland showed increased T-cells and other important immune markers in their blood within 28 days.

Continue Reading.

[reasonsforhope]

"A clinical trial studying severe allergic reactions in the U.K. is being called “life-transforming.”

Five United Kingdom National Health Service (NHS) hospitals are participating in the £2.5 million ($3.2 million) trial to help patients live with their food allergies.

The study is being funded by the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, Sky News reported. The foundation was formed in the memory of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, who died in 2016 after eating a baguette that had sesame in it...

The trial is studying clinical oral immunotherapy treatments in which patients are given small doses of the food to which they are allergic to build up their tolerance. The food is given under medical supervision by trained staff, The Telegraph reported.

The study has 139 people participating who have allergies to peanuts or cow’s milk. They range in age from 2 to 23 years old, the BBC reported.

The Food Standards Agency said 2 million people in the U.K. have a diagnosed food allergy. In the U.S., about 5.5. million children have a food allergy, the National Institutes of Health reported.

One 11-year-old who was diagnosed with a severe peanut allergy when he was an infant can now eat six peanuts.

A 5-year-old with a milk allergy can drink 120 ml of milk every day and can enjoy a daily hot chocolate, the BBC reported.

“To have a patient who has had anaphylaxis [Note: Anaphylaxis is an allergic reaction so severe that it's potentially fatal without immediate treatment. It is very common with peanut allergies in particular. x] to 4mls of milk to then tolerate 90mls within six to eight months is nothing less than a miracle,” Sibel Donmez-Ajtai, a pediatric allergy consultant and principal investigator at Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, said, according to Sky News.

The final results of the study are expected to be released in 2027.

Similar studies have been conducted in the U.S. To find one, visit FoodAllergy.org.

Earlier this year, the NIH released the findings of a study of an antibody treatment that would help children consume allergy triggers safely."

-via WHIO 7 Local News, May 8, 2024

[milf--adjacent]

Did y'all know the source of the "if you don't use your immune system it gets weaker" factoid people throw around in regards to anti-masking/antivaxx/anti-public health isn't from a study or a book or even a medical professional? It's from one of George Carlin's HBO standup specials.

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[mxmorbidmidnight]

Trying to talk to an abled person/person who doesn’t have a chronically ill person in their household about how it’s not “just a cold” and “slightly irritating nuisance” is….an experience. Mate “just a cold” for you was the reason I flunked my entire yearly exams and took multiple of said exams while actively having a functional seizure. “Just a cold” can be deadly to some and weeks of being housebound for others. I’ll be sick for three weeks then it’ll take me another four to get back to a decent state of health.

[chronicillnesshumor]

Trying to train my immune system to attack my enemies instead.

[willowreader]

For those telling me I need to get Viruses like COVID to make my immune system strong and healthy, please read this. Covid makes us age faster. Covid also damages the immune system.

[tranquilsanatorium]

[scopnotes]

An attempt of a sticker sheet for the squiggles!

[mindblowingscience]

A new part of the immune system has been discovered and it is a goldmine of potential antibiotics, scientists have said. They've shown a part of the body known to recycle proteins has a secret mode that can spew out an arsenal of bacteria-killing chemicals. The researchers in Israel say it transforms our understanding of how we are protected against infection.

Continue Reading.

[reasonsforhope]

Story from the Washington Post here, non-paywall version here.

Washington Post stop blocking linksharing and shit challenge.

"The young woman was catatonic, stuck at the nurses’ station — unmoving, unblinking and unknowing of where or who she was.

Her name was April Burrell.

Before she became a patient, April had been an outgoing, straight-A student majoring in accounting at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. But after a traumatic event when she was 21, April suddenly developed psychosis and became lost in a constant state of visual and auditory hallucinations. The former high school valedictorian could no longer communicate, bathe or take care of herself.

April was diagnosed with a severe form of schizophrenia, an often devastating mental illness that affects approximately 1 percent of the global population and can drastically impair how patients behave and perceive reality.

“She was the first person I ever saw as a patient,” said Sander Markx, director of precision psychiatry at Columbia University, who was still a medical student in 2000 when he first encountered April. “She is, to this day, the sickest patient I’ve ever seen.” ...

It would be nearly two decades before their paths crossed again. But in 2018, another chance encounter led to several medical discoveries...

Markx and his colleagues discovered that although April’s illness was clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia, she also had lupus, an underlying and treatable autoimmune condition that was attacking her brain.

After months of targeted treatments [for lupus] — and more than two decades trapped in her mind — April woke up.

The awakening of April — and the successful treatment of other people with similar conditions — now stand to transform care for some of psychiatry’s sickest patients, many of whom are languishing in mental institutions.

Researchers working with the New York state mental health-care system have identified about 200 patients with autoimmune diseases, some institutionalized for years, who may be helped by the discovery.

And scientists around the world, including Germany and Britain, are conducting similar research, finding that underlying autoimmune and inflammatory processes may be more common in patients with a variety of psychiatric syndromes than previously believed.

Although the current research probably will help only a small subset of patients, the impact of the work is already beginning to reshape the practice of psychiatry and the way many cases of mental illness are diagnosed and treated.

“These are the forgotten souls,” said Markx. “We’re not just improving the lives of these people, but we’re bringing them back from a place that I didn’t think they could come back from.” ...

Waking up after two decades

The medical team set to work counteracting April’s rampaging immune system and started April on an intensive immunotherapy treatment for neuropsychiatric lupus...

The regimen is grueling, requiring a month-long break between each of the six rounds to allow the immune system to recover. But April started showing signs of improvement almost immediately...

A joyful reunion

“I’ve always wanted my sister to get back to who she was,” Guy Burrell said.

In 2020, April was deemed mentally competent to discharge herself from the psychiatric hospital where she had lived for nearly two decades, and she moved to a rehabilitation center...

Because of visiting restrictions related to covid, the family’s face-to-face reunion with April was delayed until last year. April’s brother, sister-in-law and their kids were finally able to visit her at a rehabilitation center, and the occasion was tearful and joyous.

“When she came in there, you would’ve thought she was a brand-new person,” Guy Burrell said. “She knew all of us, remembered different stuff from back when she was a child.” ...

The family felt as if they’d witnessed a miracle.

“She was hugging me, she was holding my hand,” Guy Burrell said. “You might as well have thrown a parade because we were so happy, because we hadn’t seen her like that in, like, forever.”

“It was like she came home,” Markx said. “We never thought that was possible.”

...After April’s unexpected recovery, the medical team put out an alert to the hospital system to identify any patients with antibody markers for autoimmune disease. A few months later, Anca Askanase, a rheumatologist and director of the Columbia Lupus Center,who had been on April’s treatment team, approached Markx. “I think we found our girl,” she said.

Bringing back Devine

When Devine Cruz was 9, she began to hear voices. At first, the voices fought with one another. But as she grew older, the voices would talk about her, [and over the years, things got worse].

For more than a decade, the young woman moved in and out of hospitals for treatment. Her symptoms included visual and auditory hallucinations, as well as delusions that prevented her from living a normal life.

Devine was eventually diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which can result in symptoms of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She also was diagnosed with intellectual disability.

She was on a laundry list of drugs — two antipsychotic medications, lithium, clonazepam, Ativan and benztropine — that came with a litany of side effects but didn’t resolve all her symptoms...

She also had lupus, which she had been diagnosed with when she was about 14, although doctors had never made a connection between the disease and her mental health...

Last August, the medical team prescribed monthly immunosuppressive infusions of corticosteroids and chemotherapy drugs, a regime similar to what April had been given a few years prior. By October, there were already dramatic signs of improvement.

“She was like ‘Yeah, I gotta go,’” Markx said. “‘Like, I’ve been missing out.’”

After several treatments, Devine began developing awareness that the voices in her head were different from real voices, a sign that she was reconnecting with reality. She finished her sixth and final round of infusions in January.

In March, she was well enough to meet with a reporter. “I feel like I’m already better,” Devine said during a conversation in Markx’s office at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where she was treated. “I feel myself being a person that I was supposed to be my whole entire life.” ...

Her recovery is remarkable for several reasons, her doctors said. The voices and visions have stopped. And she no longer meets the diagnostic criteria for either schizoaffective disorder or intellectual disability, Markx said...

Today, Devine lives with her mother and is leading a more active and engaged life. She helps her mother cook, goes to the grocery store and navigates public transportation to keep her appointments. She is even babysitting her siblings’ young children — listening to music, taking them to the park or watching “Frozen 2” — responsibilities her family never would have entrusted her with before her recovery.

Expanding the search for more patients

While it is likely that only a subset of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychotic disorders have an underlying autoimmune condition, Markx and other doctors believe there are probably many more patients whose psychiatric conditions are caused or exacerbated by autoimmune issues...

The cases of April and Devine also helped inspire the development of the SNF Center for Precision Psychiatry and Mental Health at Columbia, which was named for the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which awarded it a $75 million grant in April. The goal of the center is to develop new treatments based on specific genetic and autoimmune causes of psychiatric illness, said Joseph Gogos, co-director of the SNF Center.

Markx said he has begun care and treatment on about 40 patients since the SNF Center opened. The SNF Center is working with the New York State Office of Mental Health, which oversees one of the largest public mental health systems in America, to conduct whole genome sequencing and autoimmunity screening on inpatients at long-term facilities.

For “the most disabled, the sickest of the sick, even if we can help just a small fraction of them, by doing these detailed analyses, that’s worth something,” said Thomas Smith, chief medical officer for the New York State Office of Mental Health. “You’re helping save someone’s life, get them out of the hospital, have them live in the community, go home.”

Discussions are underway to extend the search to the 20,000 outpatients in the New York state system as well. Serious psychiatric disorders, like schizophrenia, are more likely to be undertreated in underprivileged groups. And autoimmune disorders like lupus disproportionately affect women and people of color with more severity.

Changing psychiatric care

How many people ultimately will be helped by the research remains a subject of debate in the scientific community. But the research has spurred excitement about the potential to better understand what is going on in the brain during serious mental illness...

Emerging research has implicated inflammation and immunological dysfunction as potential players in a variety of neuropsychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, depression and autism.

“It opens new treatment possibilities to patients that used to be treated very differently,” said Ludger Tebartz van Elst, a professor of psychiatry and psychotherapy at University Medical Clinic Freiburg in Germany.

In one study, published last year in Molecular Psychiatry, Tebartz van Elst and his colleagues identified 91 psychiatric patients with suspected autoimmune diseases, and reported that immunotherapies benefited the majority of them.

Belinda Lennox, head of the psychiatry department at the University of Oxford, is enrolling patients in clinical trials to test the effectiveness of immunotherapy for autoimmune psychosis patients.

As a result of the research, screenings for immunological markers in psychotic patients are already routine in Germany, where psychiatrists regularly collect samples from cerebrospinal fluid.

Markx is also doing similar screening with his patients. He believes highly sensitive and inexpensive blood tests to detect different antibodies should become part of the standard screening protocol for psychosis.

Also on the horizon: more targeted immunotherapy rather than current “sledgehammer approaches” that suppress the immune system on a broad level, said George Yancopoulos, the co-founder and president of the pharmaceutical company Regeneron.

“I think we’re at the dawn of a new era. This is just the beginning,” said Yancopoulos."

-via The Washington Post, June 1, 2023

[iamnmbr3]

vaccines are so cool. i love how it's like

Vaccine: hey see this guy?

Immune system: yeah?

Vaccine: this guy sucks. remember him. he wants to make you sick.

Immune system: he what?! If I ever see him again he's gonna catch these hands.

Vaccine: good!

*

Actual illness the vaccine was for: hey! 😈 

Immune system: OMG! ITS HIM! IT'S THE GUY! PREPARE TO GET WREKT MF!!!!!!!

[kitkatstu-dies]

Day 74/100 [01/28/2025]

Immunology -> had a quiz first thing & I second-guessed myself and changed half of them to the wrong answer

Went to Genetics

Chem Lab -> we went over the normal rules so I got to go home early :)

My work scheduled me for today even though I told them my school schedule. When I reminded them they ignored me in chat & started talking about a coworker's bf -> reminded me that I need to quit!

Allergy shots -> they didn't hurt this time!

[chronicillnesshumor]