"Bring the disease" … Would it be better to fight it?

There is a new concept called "disease tolerance": instead of trying to get rid of the infectious organism, we need to change something in the vital functions of the body, namely the means which helps us to tolerate the body at the origin of the disease.

– Counter strategies

In principle, a person can protect themselves against infectious diseases by using three distinct strategies: avoidance, resistance and tolerance. Avoidance reduces the risk of exposure to infectious agents and the resistance reduces the burden of pathogens once the infection is established. Tolerance reduces the negative effects of infection on the physical form of the host without affecting the number of pathogens. Instead, tolerance reduces the exposure of the host to tissue damage.

"The term tolerance used in this context should not be confused with immune tolerance called nonresponse to antibodies produced by the body," says Palaveri Schipper in a study published in Science in 2015. It is known that pathological lesions in humans or animals lead to major changes in behavior resulting in fatigue, loss of appetite, fever and sleep disturbances. All of these events are known (behavioral behaviors) and loss of appetite and fatigue can also help maintain vital processes and promote stress tolerance in many tissues. "

Antimicrobials such as vaccines, antivirals and antibiotics are the main ways to control the infection. In addition to the fact that antigens do not affect all diseases, they also kill the beneficial bacteria that live in the body and help increase resistance to harmful bacteria (such as super-bacteria). The killing of the infectious agent is unlikely to determine whether the patient will survive a repair of functional disability (eg, tissue injury or metabolic dysfunction) that occurs during infection.

– disease tolerance

The scientific findings published in 2018 confirm the hypothesis of Janelle Ayres, published in The Scientist magazine, which she has been proposing for years, that infection control should not be a world war. Instead of trying to get rid of the pathogens that have invaded the body, these beings are what they want and transform until they gradually evolve towards something benign. This can reduce the damage caused by pathogens and the immune system.

This phenomenon is called "disease tolerance", which can be done naturally by the body using different functional systems, such as metabolism, to prevent disease. Although this is relatively new at the clinical level, some drugs available on the market for a long time encourage this strategy that improves the results.

For example, whenever someone gets a flu shot and takes Tylenol, he tries to calm the immune response that makes him sick. As a result, they will feel better, although the drug may not affect the number of pathogens in the body. During infection, immune responses designed to get rid of contagious organisms seem to be the sole or fundamental way of treating the pathogen. "There is another mechanism called disease tolerance, says Ruslan Medzritov, immunologist at the Yale University of Medical Sciences in the United States." Instead of trying to get rid of the pathogen, we need to change some things in our body, such as the organic functions causing the disease.

– The roots of "tolerance"

The researchers cited the first signs of "tolerance to the disease" in humans in 2006 when they discovered that people with alpha – type thalbademia (a blood disorder that usually reduces the production of alcohol). hemoglobin) are somehow protected by acute iron deficiency badociated with malaria.

The concept of tolerance has been developed as a defensive strategy and used in studies on the immunity of plants for decades, and recently introduced in the field of animal immunity. The initial observation of Räberg and his scientific team in 2007, published in the journal Science, showed that the severity of the disease can be separated from the burden of the causative agent. This was the first clear example of disease tolerance in animals. In his research published in 2018, Meziar Devangahi told the Southeast Asian News Agency (ANI) why the vast majority of people with pulmonary tuberculosis suffered even without developing the disease. . Experts in this area have referred to "latent TB" that affects millions of people around the world. Devangahi said tuberculosis was the best example of the disease.

– "Tolerance against preparation"

When a person gets sick, they want to feel better immediately and the body begins to reach that goal by activating the immune system to defeat invading organisms as quickly as possible. Vaccines usually help the immune system in this fight, while antibiotics or antivirals act as allies on the battlefield.

All these means target pathogens and prevent them from multiplying and spreading in the body. But often, what makes a person sick, is its immune response that causes the body to alert. This is why the patient takes painkillers or antihypertensives such as acetaminophen or paracetamol, which do not affect the pathogen at all but calm the inflammation that causes the symptoms. Scientists have recently concluded that the body can act the same way to promote health by inhibiting the immune response and reducing the incidence of invading pathogens.

During the course of the infection, the patient usually locks the iron in the cells so that the invasive bacteria can not get it. When iron is not available, bacteria badyze hemoglobin in red blood cells and break it down to take advantage of hemoglobin.

Alexander Rodensky, an immunologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center as part of his 2017 nature research, recognizes that the field as a whole is very challenging, portraying tolerance as a totally new and largely untapped area that can have applications other than infectious diseases. But also on other clinical conditions such as cancer, helping to prevent muscle loss and other malformations caused by disease or treatment.

In a new approach to treatment, Janelle Ayres of the Institute of Biological Studies at Salik in the Jolla area of ​​California and published in The Scientist in 2019, is studying how the body controls and corrects collateral damage produced during interactions with bad microbes. Iris has shown that the damage control mechanism is no less important than the immune system of the infected animal.

His discovery of a new set of defense mechanisms is likely to lead to new treatments for which bacteria will not be able to develop resistance. For damage due to infections or noncommunicable diseases, treatments using damage control mechanisms may have broader applications than antibiotics. Ultimately, using harm control mechanisms, the researcher seeks to develop treatments for infectious and noncommunicable diseases (such as cancer-related diseases and aging) without the use of antibiotics.