When Your Body Attacks Itself – Autoimmune（原声文稿）

terrifying entity made of billions of nuclear weapons and kamikaze bombers saturating every little tissue, bone and fluid in your body.

It scans, patrols and when it finds an enemy, it kills.

But what if it suddenly decides that you are the enemy?

This is the betrayal of autoimmunity.

diseases like type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, celiac disease, lupus, and Crohn's disease, and many more.

Literally every tissue can be affected from your nerves to your thyroid or joints.

They are all unique and different kinds of bad, from manageable to life-changing to deadly.

All share one fundamental property your immune system thinks some healthy part of you is the enemy.

It's like a jets, bomb roads, snipers, hunt doctors and baristas, there's usually a certain amount of genetic autoimmune disease, you also need a colossal case of produces about 100,000 different proteins or shapes.

whatever is attached to them violently and brutally.

suddenly think that your own healthy and natural proteins belong to an enemy.

video, but in a nutshell, this is such a critical created an entire murder university to prevent this from happening.

Here, young immune cells go through ruthless training.

If they recognize the shapes of your own proteins, they're executed immediately.

But sometimes, through sheer dumb luck, one makes it through.

with the potential to trigger an autoimmune disease.

Another way to trigger autoimmunity is through your enemies.

proteins that are extremely similar to the ones in your own body, interact with your cells and to stay hidden.

moths that look like bark or crocodiles that disappear in muddy water.

shapes that are very similar to your proteins. But both of these things are not enough.

and a colossal case of bad luck The war that never ends wound Any sort of infection floods your body with cytokines real fight take this seriously, which truly wakes up your immune system Intelligent cells start to gather proteins shapes from the battlefield lymph nodes, information distribution centers.

through taking a look at the shapes that are being presented here.

a few days later the attacker will be wiped out.

But this time the worst things happen in the worst kind of way.

had a protein pretty similar to one of yours.

recognize this shape survived the murder university.

pass exactly this lymph node and is activated.

This single T-cell now starts a big immune reaction against your own body.

gathers other cells for support, and streams into your tissue.

When the misguided immune cells arrive, they see nothing but enemies.

everywhere, which can only mean that there's a full-on invasion going on.

They spread out and start attacking and killing your tissue.

How bad is this? Well, it depends.

autoimmune diseases, and basically any tissue can be affected.

are attacking the insulation of your nerve cells, muscle cramps, problems with your vision and concentration.

in your pancreas, starving your cells of glucose and turning your blood into acid.

invade your joints and literally start to dissolve cartilage and bone.

widespread destruction with a variety of bad symptoms.

system tells your body to shut down and rest.

attacker, it still sends out the same orders.

It feels like you have the flu, but the real enemy is your own body.

The worst part about auto-immunity is that it never stops.

Your immune system is a self-enforcing machine of destruction.

cells they clone and activate, so its nature prevents lasting peace. Why is your body allowing this?

a genetic component, but this is kind of weird.

harmful to us, evolution should weed them out and make them less common.

But up to 1 in 10 people in the industrialized world suffers from them. So why did they stick around?

Well, when it comes to genes, we often have to work with trade-offs.

belchers analyzed DNA samples from London cemeteries before, during and after the Black Death pandemic that killed about half of the population.

Crohn's disease seemed to have died at a much lower rate.

back then might make us vulnerable to autoimmunity today.

solutions, it's only looking for good enough.

the line this might lead to something else?

carried these genes and survived a pandemic that wiped out their neighbors.

And then, a hot second ago, we changed our world.

medicine revolutionized our lives and how we die.

think a lot about infectious diseases and this is great.