Embrace your inner slob, for the sake of us all!
Tue Mar 04, 2008 at 05:09:33 PM PDT
Yes, we've discussed this before. But today the "hygiene hypothesis" got the front page treatment from the Washington Post.
Immune systems on the attack
Now, as I've posted before, my brother has ulcerative colitis (UC). This article was therefore VERY interesting to me.
The basic gist of the article, even though it was buried, is this:
The leading theory to explain the phenomenon holds that as modern medicine beats back bacterial, viral and parasitic diseases that have long plagued humanity, immune systems may fail to learn how to differentiate between real threats and benign invaders, such as ragweed pollen or food. Or perhaps because they are not busy fighting real threats, they overreact or even turn on the body's own tissues.
I've thought this for a while. My brother is the only one in the family who has UC, but my dad and I both have hyperthyroidism which some say is also autoimmune based. Now, hyperthyroidism has run in my family for about a hundred years or so, so the hypothesis can only go so far. But the article has some really interesting stats:
Though the data are stronger for some diseases than others, and part of the increase may reflect better diagnoses, experts estimate that many allergies and immune-system diseases have doubled, tripled or even quadrupled in the last few decades, depending on the ailment and country. Some studies now indicate that more than half of the U.S. population has at least one allergy.
Yikes! That's a lot of allergies.
One reason that many researchers suspect something about modern living is to blame is that the increases show up largely in highly developed countries in Europe, North America and elsewhere, and have only started to rise in other countries as they have become more developed.
Now, as my brother has astutely pointed out in the past, how do you distinguish who in the Third World is suffering from dysentery and who is suffering from UC without expensive tests? This could just be a case of not having the right diagnostic tools. This is where science comes in.
Another promising line of research involves giving patients microscopic parasitic worms to try to tamp down the immune system.
"We've seen rather dramatic improvements in patients' conditions," said Summers of the University of Iowa, who has treated more than 100 people with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis by giving them parasitic worms that infect pigs but are harmless to humans. "We're not claiming that this is a cure, but we saw a very dramatic improvement. Some patients went into complete remission."
Sounds gross, but man, I would swallow worms in a heartbeat if I had my brother's condition. I'd feed them to my kid, too. This paragraph, of course, gripped me, and was the reason I reread this article 4 or 5 times today. Could it be this simple? Could my brother be cured this easily? It seems almost too good to be true. But, man, its SO enticing.
As a mother, I spent the day thinking about the implications of this article. Should I have skipped the chicken pox vaccine for DD, just so she could have fought it off and further developed her immune system? (After watching my dad suffer from shingles, I really don't know.) How long should I wait to take DD to the doctor for an earache or a fever now? Should we get a dog, since the article mentions that kids with pets or who live on a farm have less problems? The implications are wide ranging, and a little daunting. All I know is that I would do quite a bit to prevent my daughter from getting her uncle's disease.
What would you do, MTs?
