I’ve been doing a lot of study into this recently, and it does get complicated. To start with, while mast cells can release Histamine-1, and Benedryl, a Histamine-1 inhibitor, will interfere with it, it likely has little or no effect on the mast cells themselves, just on one of their products when they are degranulating.
To make matters a lot more confusing, there are about 150 cytokine and histamine chemicals and free radicals that work together, and we are still trying to figure out which do what, and to which others they do it to. Histamine-2, as an example, is responsible for acid reflux, so you can block it directly, with OTC H-2 inhibitors like Zantac, or you can slow down its production with the newer “proton pump” drugs.
As one researcher put it, he figured out that to become an expert in this stuff, you have to master the art of creating large wall charts with small text and lots of multicolored straight and dotted connecting lines on them.
Importantly, this research into obesity and diabetes directly impacts the study of influenza as well as a host of other diseases.
Thanks so much for sharing your expertise with me — I was certain that this topic was going to be much more complicated than the news articles I’ve come across were making it out to be.
This is really EXCITING research, and I hope something comes of it, soon, to eradicate the obesity epidemic and plague of type 2 diabetes.
I’m going to print out your posting, so that when I attempt to research this on my own, that I won’t be “hoodwinked” by excrutiatingly dumbed-down articles — something I seem to be encountering more & more on the Internet.... a simplified idea, while not altogether inaccurate, is simply not entirely correct — then gets repeated ad infinitum until it looks like The Truth to a layperson like myself.
It’s quite disconcerting to spend hours researching stuff above my head, and then weeks later, when my understanding is better, to realize that I’d been ‘hood winked,’ yet again with very partial information. :)