Hello! My first post ever in this community. Hopefully I’m doing this right, lol. I’ve been wondering for a while now, why does the flu cause cytokine storm and cause death in seemingly young healthy adults who have no other underlying health conditions?
Example: (I’m going to get my Chubby Emu onto this, lol) Jimmy is a 27 year old man, presenting to the emergency room, with fever, shortness of breath, and other flu like symptoms.
Earlier in the day, Jimmy was at work when he caught a bad bought of flu. “No problem, I’ll just go home and get some rest. It’s just the flu”, he thought. Jimmy arrived home and got into bed with some medication and fluids and tried to sleep. A few days later, Jimmy’s symptoms seemed to have worsened. He had no other underlying health conditions. His breathing got worse, his symptoms more severe, and he had an extremely high fever. Jimmy calls 911 for an ambulance and he’s brought to the emergency room where we are now.
Jimmy is in extremely ill health and is rapidly deteriorating. Doctors do everything they can, but it’s too late. Jimmy is pronounced dead a few hours later after arriving at the hospital despite the doctors best efforts. Cause of death? Cytokine Storm
So what is cytokine storm, and why does it cause people, especially healthy people to die from the flu?
In: Biology
I’m a doctor. Happy to help.
So the flu can and does kill, but not always from cytokine storm.
Cytokines are signaling molecules in the body they are a good thing. The immune system, in particular, uses them to send messages and “turn on” various functions in the immune system.
99% of the effects you’ve noticed when you get a viral illness (flu included) are from your immune system being activated. The aches, the fever, the tremors, the chills are all effects caused by your body turning on various parts of the immune system.
For reasons that aren’t well understood, some people or some strains of the virus have a VERY exaggerated immune response. In trying to fight off the virus, way too many cytokines are produced. This turns on the immune system too much. The inflammation that’s caused by the immune system tends to cause lots of relaxation of smooth muscles cells, including the ones in your blood vessels. So they dilate and become leaky. This leads to lower pressure in the vessels, which means you can’t send enough blood flow to your vital organs. So they start to fail and if enough damage is done, you can’t recover and die.
This is but one of many ways in which the flu can kill. Young children and older adults are at particular risk for this (due to immature immune systems in the young ones and chronic organ damage in the old ones), but doesn’t discriminate. Even in younger, healthy folks, if there’s enough inflammation and organ damage, they won’t survive.
Latest Answers