Autoimmunity: Defense mechanism against the enemy within (PART 1)

 So, it's been a while since I posted. Life has been very eventful and a rollercoaster these months. I recently participated in a seminar on autoimmunity, and here follows the story regarding it. Learning about it was fun, and so was presenting it. Enjoy :)

Source: Pinterest, theawkwardyeti.com

"Aaahhhh...NO... NO." Khushi screams at the top of her lungs and runs like Usain Bolt, past me. Just like a rumbling train that got near me and swiftly passed. And I was like, "Okay, this girl got quite some speed and energy. ". And just as I was done thinking about all the possible reasons that she might be running at eight o'clock in the morning; I heard the funny demonic laughter of a kid, and I turned back again to see Yash, her younger brother, carrying a stick and running after Khushi. I wondered if they might be playing tag and sat on the jhula of my garden with a glass of chilled orange juice. And there I get a perfect view of two siblings running after each other and just as always, the younger one teasing the older one. I wondered if they knew how much they were going to miss that once they all grow up. And just as I was reminiscing my sweet and sour memories with Shreya, they both come to me to get an unbiased opinion after playing courtroom for a while and being the "Judge", I told them to be strong and be a team. A team never fights within and stays strong. But then this reminded me of autoimmunity. 

And as I told them about this, they got confused as to how can their running after each other correlates to autoimmunity. And I explained that they both were a team but still, they turned up against each other and that's exactly what happens in autoimmunity. It is the defense mechanism against the enemy within. 

Khushi being the curious kid, asked me, "So, does this mean that my immune system kills off my own body? But why? Isn't our immunity supposed to keep us protected from all those deadly germs?"

"Yes, that's exactly what happens in autoimmunity, our immune cells like T-Cells kills off the body as certain protection system goes preventing this goes wrong and this leads to several disorders," I replied.

She asked, "But why?"

"Well, because our immune cells cannot distinguish between what is its own and what is foreign and misinterpreting the self-cells kill themselves off to protect the body from its cells. What marks self from non-self-cells are little proteins present on the outer surface of a cell that our body's immune cells can identify." I replied gladly as I saw her taking interest in a new concept.

"Okay, this is interesting. Tell me more about this. What about those protection systems to prevent from this happening?" She asked more.

And our convo goes on as I replied, "So, let's say I have heaps and heaps of gold then I'd like to protect it, right? And to do so, I'd put it under lots of layers of security to prevent its theft. Just so, our bodies are also very precious and to prevent anything going wrong like this, we've employed certain policing that keeps our immune cells from doing this nasty business. That is called Tolerance, and it has main two layers of security too central and peripheral." 

Khushi said, "Hold up, hold up. Keep this simple for me and tell me what causes this autoimmunity and where this happens?"

I replied, "Let us deal with one question at a time. It can happen at any one part of the body and stay localized as organ-specific autoimmune disorders or be delocalized and the effect is directed towards a broad range of targets of organs and tissues as in systemic autoimmune disorders. The first one generally leads to a loss of function in the organ. And talking about the causes, they can be variable, environmental, genetic, and even certain infections and something fancy called exposure of immune cells to certain privileged sites."

Khushi was curious to know more about this and was so excited by the topic that she asked me to hold up as she went to call some of her other friends in the society to listen to this cool concept. 

And we shall continue in part II, discussing the causes of autoimmunity and a little something more.