Genetic susceptibilities, the environment and the body's response to inflammation all influence our odds of falling ill
Everyone gets sick. Despite all the vegetables we eat or vitamins we gulp down, sooner or later pathogens such as viruses and harmful bacteria infiltrate our bodies, and we need to take a time-out. We sit back and let our immune system do its job.
Scientific American spoke with the study’s lead author, Sunil Ahuja, a professor of medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and director of the Department of Veterans Affairs Center for Personalized Medicine, about why some people fall ill more often.Why are some people more susceptible to getting sick?
These are kind of static factors. But then the third factor is response to inflammatory stress. I might respond in one way to one infection and in another way to a different infection. It’s a yin-yang. Environment plays a role, and that same genetic thing that’s protective against one infection can be detrimental for another infection. People show variation in how they respond to these challenges—which could also have a genetic basis.
The traditional way of doing research is to compare the old versus the young. This presumes that the only thing that is different between a young person and an old person is their age when, in fact, that’s not quite true. One might need to break down the old group into varying degrees of immune health. That’d be like saying, “I’m in my 60s”—which I am—“and I’m now an old fart, and I’m like every other old fart.” That may not be true. There are old farts who are 110 years old who do just fine.
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