BiTherapca Health

There is no doubt that some inflammation assists immunity. But those two mean different things. Inflammation is the body's response to injury and involves the contingency to remove devitalized tissue to enable repair to follow. This calls for some 'surgery' by the white cells. Who talks surgery talks extraordinary measures of invasiveness that necessitate degranulation which is then followed by phagocytosis. No such action goes without bystander consequences since it is often non specific and not well contained. Microbes and host cells then become victims. Leucotrienes that result from cellular damage act as chemoattractants of white cells to the injury site . They also help white cells to degranulate, at the same time that prostaglandins are producing and augmenting pain. Immunity on the other hand specifically targets invader microbes which themselves carry specific patterns that help the white cells locate, find and kill them. Ideally, immunity should be specific an...

Disease tolerance and disease resistance are various ways to confer immunity. At the beginning of an infection, when nutrients are plentiful, sacrificing cell survival to kill the infecting microbe can be acceptable since nutrition may be adequate to bring about tissue replacement. This damage has, as a consequence, tissue and immune cell aging due to continuous replacement of cells by others, many times over. As nutrients dwindle, in the face of increased cellular and microbe activitites and toxic outputs, this strategy may fail to yield the desired outcome Low methionine, the principal participant in the increased lifespan following dietary restriction, becomes evident as the methionine salvage pathway comes in to recycle methionine from spermine, spermidine and putrescine(polyamines). APIP is an enzyme that makes MTA that eventually provides methionine but at the same time prevents cell death, as if by monitoring this nutrient availability. The disease becomes less debilitating,...

Autophagy has the house-keeping role in the body. It consists of sequestration which packages the debris and then encloses the load in a vacuole called the phagosome, a double-membrane enclosure that eventually merges with the digestive, treatment unit called the lysosome to form the phagolysosome. Sometimes the system fails to function properly and debris accumulates in the cell, usually with stress and aging. Cells that do not regenerate readily undergo extensive autophagy to rejuvenate. These include the nerve cell, the skeletal muscle cell and tissue macrophages. Autophagy is initially a survival mechanism which enables the cell to survive in times of nutritional/metabolic stress, through the breakdown of less needed organelles and the harvest of food from garbage, including microbes, just like plants do. When the system is overwhelmed, garbage accumulates in cells, which no longer function effectively to process further garbage, program themselves to die naturally, kil...

It is rapidly becoming clear that stress, both psychological and physical(physical stress or damage has a psychological component to it) is responsible for the vast majority of degenerative and age-related diseases, immune deficiencies and autoimmune diseases, metabolic diseases and cancers. And infectious diseases can be added on the list since the immune system is affected. Since genetic mutations are effected by stress, it means that genetic diseases are included as well. So basically all diseases are caused by damage to body tissue(stress). Response to frank stress(necrosis) presents as inflammation, and cell suicide(apoptosis) occurs in less severe instances. In-between we have necroptosis and pyroptosis. For survival, our body tissues need repairs with or without autophagy(the breakdown of less needed tissues in order to have substrates to repair high priority tissues). Repair is priority to the body and the priority tissue number one, because it is so badly needed for awaren...

Recent studies have revealed that, of all the countries surveyed globally, South Africa(Alcohol and stress carried over from the Apartheid era?) has the highest prevalence of hypertension, closely followed by Russia(vodka?), in which over 70% of people aged above 50 years are hypertensive. The sad thing is that most of these people do not even know they have the condition and, worse still, of course, their condition is not managed. Hypertension, especially, predisposes people to stroke and heart attack. High bad-cholesterol and other fats, and hence weight, affect high blood pressure. Diabetes, as well. Hence the need for exercise to control weight and bring about other health benefits. Nutritional choices are important as they influence body weight and cell protection. Psychological stress and infections, smoking and alcohol intake, play a part, as well, for the strain they put on the body and the stress they inflict on cells. Raised blood pressure will break loose plaque la...

It is said that if you have Shingles you wait for up to a year after the episode and then have the vaccine. Given that the virus reactivation itself should have provided protection to the individual and, for that matter, a better one, notwithstanding the debilitation, I don't see this business of insisting on vaccination as the way to prevent further Herpes Zoster breakouts, let alone the vascular nefarious fallouts. Vaccination could make a controlled situation roll out of hand! Rather than let sleeping dogs lie, we now wake the virus up with this approach and succeed to cause more harm to the host. With age and stress, what reduces immunity(controlled protection) is over-activation which spells inflammation even in the presence of cortisol, not the reverse, and that is the cause of the Shingles breakouts in most cases, in the first place. Exercise, antioxidants and proper nutrition(polyhenols and phytosterols) will tip the balance to a more effective, regulated immune express...