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...