Autoimmune Diseases

The immuneological system is the most important defense system that the organism has to confront virus aggressions, bacteria and other strange substances. Its function consists of recognizing each one of the tissues, of the cells and of the proteins of the organism to distinguish them out of a wide variety of pathogenic agents, to those which it must destroy. In this process, the lymphocytes T that form part of the white cells sanguine have great importance.

Normally during the fetal development the immune system learns to distinguish the own substances of the organism, inactivating or destroying the lymphocytes T that reacted against one's owns. But if these cells are not inactivated or destroyed, in the feature they can develop a clone that's unable to distinguish between what is one's own and what is not own, generating a autoimmune reaction. As consequence of this reaction an inflammatory process on the organ or the organs that contain this substance is generated, denominated target organ. This provokes damage in the target organ that results in loss in the said organ functionality deteriorating the quality of life of the patient and putting in risk his life. In some individual, the autoimmune diseases are manifested after years of normal functionality of the immune system. This occurs after an infection with a bacteria or common virus, that contains a protein with a similar fragment to an tissue of the individual. Said fragment is, some times, of only 5 amino acids.

The autoimmune diseases are expressed largely in women (two-thirds of the total) and are very extended (5% of the population in the United States). Some examples of them are the rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, diabetes type I, myasthenia gravis, lupus erythema, and psoriasis.

In the last years, a therapy has emerged, that has been given the name Oral Tolerance, that uses the natural mechanism that permits the organism not to reject the foods, that would be foreign substances to it. This occurs by the suppression of the immune response to foreign substances, in which participates lymphoid tissue associated with the intestine, mainly the Peyer patches. The results obtained with this therapeutic were successful in animals as well as in humans, and we expose its foundations in the designated Oral Tolerance topic.