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The bubonic plague killed so many people in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa that that natural selection event is still rippling through our genomes today. But the same genes that helped your ancestors survive the Black Death may be contributing to autoimmune disease today.Have an Autoimmune Disease? Blame the Black Death | 7:16SciShow | 7.77M subscribers | 572,860 views | November 7, 2023

My wife has developed a horrible skin rashes, size of grapefruits. Doctor prescribed Dupixent because nothing else is working after other medications and light therapy. Anyone else gone through this?

A study conducted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Food and Drug Administration has shown that the risk of myocarditis following mRNA COVID vaccination is around 133x greater than the background risk in the population. This means Covid vaccination increases the risk of suffering myocarditis, an autoimmune disease causing inflammation of the heart, by 13,200%. ... The study, conducted by researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as well as from several U.S. universities and hospitals, examined the effects of vaccination with products manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. The study’s authors used data obtained from the...

Swansea University researchers have found that a drug commonly used to treat type 2 diabetes can potentially be used in the treatment of autoimmune disorders. Academics have found that the drug, canagliflozin (also known as Invokana), could be used to treat autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus as it targets T-cells, which form an essential component of the immune system. Canagliflozin is a drug that controls blood sugar levels in people with type 2 diabetes, however researchers have found an unexpected role for the drug involving the human immune system. Existing research has reported that targeting...

Multisite chronic pain is causally associated with a higher risk for multiple sclerosis (MS) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA), but not with other autoimmune diseases (AIDs), according to a study. Yidan Tang and colleagues used a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) method to determine the causal relationship between chronic pain and AIDs, namely amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), celiac disease (CeD), inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), MS, RA, systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), type 1 diabetes (T1D), and psoriasis using genome-wide association study summary statistics. The researchers identified associations between multisite chronic pain and a higher risk for MS and RA (odds ratios, 1.59 and...

You can't make a banana split without bananas. And you can't generate stable regulatory T cells without Vitamin C or enzymes called TET proteins, it appears. Regulatory T cells (Tregs) help control inflammation and autoimmunity in the body. Tregs are so important, in fact, that scientists are working to generate stable induced Tregs (iTregs) in vitro for use as treatments for autoimmune diseases as well as rejection to transplanted organs. Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to find the right molecular ingredients to induce stable iTregs. In their analysis, the researchers found TET proteins are absolutely required for maintaining the gene...

Experts in Israel found that patients with certain autoimmune diseases who received the Pfizer/BioNTech jab were more likely to develop the rash than those without the condition. Side effects can occur with any medication, including vaccines. They are always listed on the product information leaflet which comes with the medication. Most people who have a Covid jab won’t suffer any side effects but for those who have experienced them, the most common include pain at the site of injection and fatigue. Medics at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center and Carmel Medical Center in Haifa found that shingles was five...

A daily dose of baking soda may help reduce the destructive inflammation of autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, scientists say. They have shown that when rats or healthy people drink a solution of baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate, it becomes a trigger for the stomach to make more acid to digest the next meal and for little-studied mesothelial cells sitting on the spleen to tell the fist-sized organ that there's no need to mount a protective immune response. Mesothelial cells line body cavities, like the one that contains our digestive tract, and they also cover the exterior of our organs...

Cells that scientists have largely ignored when studying multiple sclerosis are actually key contributors to MS development, new research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine shows. The discovery suggests new avenues for devising treatments and is a vital step toward finding a cure. Cells that scientists have largely ignored when studying multiple sclerosis are actually key contributors to MS development, new research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine shows. The discovery suggests new avenues for devising treatments and is a vital step toward finding a cure. In MS, the body's immune system begins to attack the...

A daily dose of baking soda may help reduce the destructive inflammation of autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, scientists say. They have some of the first evidence of how the cheap, over-the-counter antacid can encourage our spleen to promote instead an anti-inflammatory environment that could be therapeutic in the face of inflammatory disease, Medical College of Georgia scientists report in the Journal of Immunology. They have shown that when rats or healthy people drink a solution of baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate, it becomes a trigger for the stomach to make more acid to digest the next meal and for...

Usually I don’t talk about political or news figures, but I ran across this article and it really got my attention. Glenn Beck is a controversial media figure and many people either like him or hate him. But that is not the focus of this article. The question is, is he being poisoned by a person? No. Glenn has been dealing with neuropathy for awhile and has been to see lots of different medical specialists to get to the root of his issue. The doctors believed that he was being poisoned…by the food that he had been eating. He had...

Abstract Interleukin-6 (IL-6) is a classic pro-inflammatory cytokine critical in mounting an effective immune response. It is secreted by a wide array of cell types; however, its effector cells are more restricted, owing to the fact that very few cells, except lymphocytes and hepatocytes, express the functional membrane IL-6 receptor thus reducing the number of IL-6-responsive cells. Trans-signalling, the shedding of the membrane-bound form of the IL-6 receptor into the local microenvironment, greatly increases the range of cells that can respond. IL-6 has been demonstrated to have a pivotal role in the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis, Castleman’s disease and Crohn’s...

Enlarge Image Don't pass the salt. The food flavoring prompts generic T cells like these to specialize into TH17 cells that stimulate autoimmune diseases, new findings suggest. Credit: N. Yosef et al., Nature 495 (6 March) © 2013 Nature Publishing Group For decades, doctors have been admonishing us to cut back on salt to reduce the odds of a heart attack or stroke. Now, there may be a new reason to avoid the seasoning: Studies on rodents and cultured cells, reported today, reveal that dietary salt might promote autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel disease. The...

A team of Weizmann Institute scientists has turned the tables on an autoimmune disease. In such diseases, including Crohn's and rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system mistakenly attacks the body's tissues. But the scientists managed to trick the immune systems of mice into targeting one of the body's players in autoimmune processes, an enzyme known as MMP9. The results of their research appear today in Nature Medicine. Prof. Irit Sagi of the Biological Regulation Department and her research group have spent years looking for ways to home in on and block members of the matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) enzyme family. These proteins...

An article to be published Friday (Dec. 23) in the December 2011 issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology argues that multiple sclerosis, long viewed as primarily an autoimmune disease, is not actually a disease of the immune system. Dr. Angelique Corthals, a forensic anthropologist and professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, suggests instead that MS is caused by faulty lipid metabolism, in many ways more similar to coronary atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) than to other autoimmune diseases. Framing MS as a metabolic disorder helps to explain many puzzling aspects of the disease,...

It is vital that the body's own immune system does not overreact. If its key players, the helper T cells, get out of control, this can lead to autoimmune diseases or allergies. An immune system overreaction against infectious agents may even directly damage organs and tissues. Immune cells called regulatory T cells ("Tregs") ensure that immune responses take place in a coordinated manner: They downregulate the dividing activity of helper T cells and reduce their production of immune mediators. "This happens through direct contact between regulatory cell and helper cell," says Prof. Peter Krammer of DKFZ. "But we didn't know...

TORONTO, Canada—Researchers at the University of Toronto have found an explanation for how the intestinal tract influences a key component of the immune system to prevent infection, offering a potential clue to the cause of autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. "The findings shed light on the complex balance between beneficial and harmful bacteria in the gut," said Prof. Jennifer Gommerman, an Associate Professor in the Department of Immunology at U of T, whose findings were published online by the scientific journal, Nature. "There has been a long-standing mystery of how certain cells can differentiate between and attack...

Carbohydrate activates B cells in skin, connective tissues Researchers led by HMS Associate Professor of Medicine Julia Wang offer a new, unifying theory on the origins of autoimmune diseases. In two related papers in the May 2011 issue of the American Journal of Pathology, the team outlines a process by which a carbohydrate abundant in skin and connective tissue called dermatan sulfate turns traitorous. The resulting disease may be systemic, as in lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, or localized, as in Type 1 diabetes or Graves’ disease. Only a tiny subset of molecules in the body are known to have the...

Type 2 diabetes, like Type 1, may be an autoimmune disease, but the immune system's target cells are different, Stanford researchers said Sunday. The discovery sheds new light on how obesity contributes to the onset of Type 2 diabetes and could lead to new types of treatment for the disorder, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Medicine.

Differences in the sequence of a single gene may be partly responsible for causing around 2% of relatively common autoimmune disorders including diabetes and arthritis. The gene codes for an enzyme called sialic acid acetylesterase (SIAE) that regulates the immune system's B cells — the cells responsible for producing antibodies against foreign invaders. In 24 of 923 people with conditions such as Crohn's disease, type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus and multiple sclerosis, the gene was present in a variant form. For the past five years, genome-wide screens of large groups of patients have searched for commonly occurring...