eli5: what happens on a cellular level when someone has an allergic reaction?
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Most of symptoms that you experience during an illness is produced by your own immune system to fight an infection.
Fever, runny nose, coughing are your body trying to get rid of the pathogen.
Also your immune system has some pretty nasty trained killers, that are very good at their job, that is killing cells. Unfortunately you are made of cells and sometimes the killer cells do collatheral damage killing healthy cells.
Even your immune system can go so overboard, that it kills you, Like Auto-immune diseases.
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As for allergens, your body misidentifies allergens as pathogens and it starts to attack it, more and more drastically. The problem is that it doesn’t really work, since they are not bacteria or viruses. When reaches the carpet bombing state with inflamation and hystamine release, it starts to get really dangerous, your immune system is raging killing anything and everything around the allergen.
Anaphylaxis is when your life is in danger, your heart is in overdrive, you are inflamed allover, breathing starts to get hard even impossible. There is a hight chance that you die.
Your immune system’s job is not to keep you alive, it’s job to kill foreign invaders.
You need high dose adrenaline, which opens up your airways and increases your blood pressure.
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I would suggest watching “Cells at Work”, it is a little oversimplified but does a decent job to show the basics of the immune system
It has a dedicated episode about allergies
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