Activating immune response Effects of worm infections on the immune system

What makes an infection with worms with our immune system

Worm infections can trigger illnesses with a variety of symptoms such as abdominal pain, diarrhea or after-itching. However, the parasite infections also affect our immune system.

Low risk of infection in Germany

Worm infections are among the most common parasitic diseases worldwide. In Western countries, however, high standards of hygiene and clean drinking water ensure that there is little risk of infection. In Germany, according to experts, infestation with pinworms usually occurs, more rarely with roundworms or roundworms. German researchers are now reporting the effects of worm infections on our immune system.

Worm infections can be unremarkable for a long time, but sometimes they pose significant health risks. Researchers are currently studying the effects of such infections on the immune system. (Image: Dr_Kateryna / fotolia.com)

Immune responses to infections

The immune system has a large repertoire of different immune responses to infections and other external threats, and each selects the class of immune response that is particularly effective in controlling an invading pathogen.

Thus, in infections with worms, the so-called type 2 immune response is activated, which aims to make life difficult for these large parasites, which the immune system is scarcely able to kill.

Type 2 responses are also of paramount importance under the current hygienic conditions in Europe, where worm infections are not very important, as they are caused by harmless environmental allergens in an uncontrolled manner, causing allergic diseases such as asthma and atopic dermatitis.

Asthma-typical reaction patterns

Various worms migrate through the human respiratory tract and the Type 2 immune response activates the typical reaction pattern of asthma, such as tightness, mucous production and coughing, with the aim of coughing up the worms.

"These cardinal symptoms of asthma can be understood as, for example, by pollen, falsely activated mechanisms of worm defense," said Prof. Axel Roers, Director of the Institute of Immunology of the Faculty of Medicine Carl Gustav Carus of the TU Dresden in a statement.

Roers is the spokesman of a research group of the German Research Foundation (DFG), which investigates mechanisms of type 2 immune responses.

In addition to scientists from Dresden, colleagues from Munich, Cologne, Freiburg, Erlangen and Berlin are also involved.

Immune responses promote wound healing

But type 2 immune responses have also recently come to the fore for other reasons.

They promote the healing of wounds - also understandably in the context of the treatment of worm infections, since worms drill themselves through different human tissues and cause thereby damage, which must be repaired as fast as possible.

Fascinatingly, malignant tumors utilize these regeneration-promoting mechanisms and selectively activate type 2 immune responses in the tumor tissue, which then support cancer growth.

The recent discovery that type 2 immune responses also play a crucial role in the regulation of metabolic balance and that immunological dysregulation contributes to important metabolic diseases, such as type II diabetes, was astonishing. (Ad)