What to know about your immune system and autoimmune disease

Whenever you go to a new environment the first thing you do is to adapt and make some observation. You try as much as possible to know some things in your surroundings and how you will go about it.

This is also applicable to our body. During birth our immune system try to get conversant with the body system, this enables it to detect any foreign body or pathogens that may try invading the body.
As you grow, all the body organs including the body immune system also grows. This enables the body to ward off some pathogens and other diseases in the body system.

Immune development occurs In the foetus towards the fourth week of pregnancy when the baby is still at the size of poppy seed. At this time the cells starts dividing and develops into immune system cells which is known as hematopoietic progenitor cells. This cell has a protein located at the surface of the cell. Remember, during the onset of pregnancy this cell divides rapidly but draws down towards the end of pregnancy to become specialized cells. If paradventure a woman delivers prematurely, there is always an increase amount of this unspecialized progenitor cells in the babies system.

The Early progenitor cells travel through the blood into different organ associated with immune response. These organ includes liver, spleen and thymus. By second to third month of pregnancy most of this cells must have developed to naive T cells which matures by the fifth month.

Before we continue there is this important question people always ask concerning a pregnant mother. They say, why is it that the mother immune system does not react with the foetus since the mother and the baby is not genetically identical.

Well, this is a nice question, but the truth is, scientists have not fully discovered the main reason behind it but have come up with some little fact while it is so.

Firstly,

The foetal immune system is not functional in the womb. It remains Inactive in the womb until after birth. Immune system are suppressed therefore making it very difficult for the mothers antibody to react against them.

Secondly,

The fetal cell crosses the placental into the mothers system during fourth or fifth week of pregnancy. This cells remain in the mothers system years after delivery.
This cells help the mothers antibody to get use of the environment and takes the fetal cell as one of them. With this, the mothers immune system cannot be able to react with the foetus. The presence of this cells in the mothers system is known as what we call microchimerism.

what is microchimerism

Microchimerism is defined as the presence of low concentrations of two genetically distinct cell populations in the same individualsource

This microchimerism happens on several occasions between mother and the foetus during pregnancy, twin to twin transfer, organ transplantation and blood donation.

During pregnancy there is always an association between the mother and the foetus in the womb. This fetal microchimerism is identified using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to discover Y chromosomes DNA sequence in the mother.

Remember our main point towards writing of this article is to detail why autoimmune disease occurs and some little understanding on our immune system and how it develops.

Without wasting much of our time let's quickly look at human leukocytes antigen and how it can be compared to autoimmune disease.

human leukocytes antigen

This is considered the most important part of the immune system that is being located at the chromosomes 6. Human leukocytes antigen is also known as major histocompatibility complex and it is being divided into two classes.

Class 1 major histocompatibility complex

This is a transmembrane glycoprotein found on the surface of nucleated cells. It comprised of alpha heavy chain which binds to beta 2 microglobulin molecules. The heavy chain of this molecules comprises of immunoglobulin like domain and cytoplasmic tail which is also encoded by genes at HLA-A,HLA- B and HLA- C loci.

class 2 major histocompatibility complex

This are found only on specific antigens. These includes macrophages, dendritic cells, langerhans, thymic epithelium and activated t cells. This also consist of two polypeptide known as alpha and beta polypeptide which everyone of them has a binding domain. These polypeptide chains are encoded by hla-dp, dq and dr.

Getting to understand to this point, you can be able to comfortably say what immune system is all about and how it be developed. At this point also we are going to talk about how this immune system works in the presence of aclaimed antigen which will actually lead us to what we call autoimmune disease.

autoimmune disease

Autoimmune disease is a disease whereby the body immune system react with the bodies antigen in a view as a foreign body.
A lot of things can be a reason why an antibody react to it own self.

During the development of the immune system, the body tries to get use to the body system knowing the self and non self. This aclamatization enables the body to react against any other foreign body.

Our body trying to react to itself can be caused by a lot of things which includes
Medications, smoking, exposure to toxins,obesity and infection.

Sometimes the drugs we take has a way of distorting our normal cells. Take for instance a cancer patient who is on chemotherapy for a long time. The drug he or she takes has a way of trying to inhibit the cancerous cells from growing. This might affect the normal cell thereby changing its constituent.

When this happens, the body immune system secrets a response against the cell leading to what we known as autoimmune disease.

This also applies to other things including infections and many others.

in conclusion

Knowing the pattern at which your immune system works will help you to understand that our immune system is specifically interested in the self and react to non self. You can as well also understand that autoimmune immune disease is caused by the body reacting against itself with the view as foreign antigen.

This article will not only widen your knowledge in immune system but also will teach you how your body may react to it self in sudden changes occurs.

thank you for reading