New Features Of The Immune System

New Features Of The Immune System.
A renewed read has uncovered evidence that most cases of narcolepsy are caused by a misguided immune system attack - something that has been hunger suspected but unproven. Experts said the finding, reported Dec 18, 2013 in Science Translational Medicine, could captain to a blood test for the sleep disorder, which can be awkward to diagnose. It also lays out the possibility that treatments that focus on the immune system could be used against the disease. "That would be a elongate way out," said Thomas Roth, director of the Sleep Disorders and Research Center at Henry Ford Hospital, in Detroit.

So "If you're a narcolepsy compliant now, this isn't succeeding to change your clinical care tomorrow," added Roth, who was not confusing in the study. Still the findings are "exciting," and advance the understanding of narcolepsy. Narcolepsy causes a arrange of symptoms, the most common being excessive sleepiness during the day. But it may be best known for triggering potentially perilous "sleep attacks".

In these, people fall asleep without warning, for anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. About 70 percent of living souls with narcolepsy have a symptom called cataplexy - impetuous bouts of muscle weakness. That's known as type 1 narcolepsy, and it affects brutally one in 3000 people, according to the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Research shows that those ancestors have low levels of a brain chemical called hypocretin, which helps you stay awake.

And experts have believed the deficiency is unquestionably caused by an abnormal immune system attack on the leader cells that produce hypocretin. "Narcolepsy has been suspected of being an autoimmune disease," said Dr Elizabeth Mellins, a chief author of the study and an immunology researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine, in California. "But there's never positively been proof of immune system activity that's any other from normal activity". Mellins thinks her team has uncovered "very strong evidence" of just such an underlying problem. The researchers found that colonize with narcolepsy have a subgroup of T cells in their blood that reply to particular portions of the hypocretin protein - but narcolepsy-free people do not.

T cells are a frequency part of immune system defenses against infection. That finding was based on 39 commoners with type 1 narcolepsy, and 35 people without the disorder - including four sets of twins in which one double was affected and the other was not. It's known that genetic susceptibility plays a impersonation in narcolepsy. And the theory is that in people with that inherent risk, certain environmental triggers may cause an autoimmune repulsion against the body's own hypocretin.

Infections are the main culprit, and there is already evidence that the H1N1 "swine" flu is one trigger. In China there was an upswing in youth narcolepsy cases after the H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009. And in 2010, a assemble of narcolepsy cases in Europe was linked to a particular H1N1 vaccine that contained an "adjuvant" designed to impel a stronger immune system response. That vaccine, called Pandemrix, is no longer in use.

All of that led experts to take a plunge that in some genetically unshielded people, the H1N1 virus could cause T cells to mistakenly attack hypocretin-producing brain cells. And in the widely known study, Mellins's team found that segments of the H1N1 virus were similar to portions of the hypocretin protein - the same portions that activated narcolepsy patients' T cells. They for instance that supports the dream that certain infections confuse T cells into attacking hypocretin-producing cells.

An excellent on sleep welcomed the new study. "They're providing more-compelling substantiation that this is an autoimmune disease," said Dr Nathaniel Watson, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Washington in Seattle, and a associate of the board of directors for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. He and Mellins both said the results could have field use, too. For one, researchers may be able to age a blood test to help objectively diagnose narcolepsy.

Right now narcolepsy can be difficult to pinpoint, because the most normal symptom - daytime sleepiness - has far more common causes. The most common is simple: Not prevalent to bed early enough. So to diagnose narcolepsy, people may have to assign 24 hours in a sleep lab or, in some cases, have a lumbar puncture (spinal tap) to scale hypocretin in the spinal fluid. She said that if an autoimmune reaction is the cause of type 1 narcolepsy, it might be tenable to treat with an immune-suppressing therapy.

The problem, though, is that once people develop full-blown symptoms, their hypocretin-producing cells have already been knocked off. "We'd basic some kind of pre-clinical marker of the sickness to be able to intervene," said Watson at the University of Seattle. Roth of Henry Ford Hospital agreed. "The big dispute is, how will you identify the people to treat?" Three of the study authors reported they are inventors on a obvious to use the hypocretin protein segments to diagnose narcolepsy cetirizine. Stanford owns the thought-provoking property rights for this use.