What causes your body to suddenly develop an allergic reaction to something later on in life that you weren’t allergic to before?

Question

i.e. how does ur body suddenly decide something is dangerous enough to warrant a reaction even tho it didnt cause it before

i might be using these tags wrong yeesh

In: 42

Answer 1

Depends on what you are asking. We know how allergies occur – it’s got to do with our immune system. Our immune system constantly monitors everything that goes inside our body and, when it finds something harmful, studies it and creates antibodies that target that specific pathogen. Next time our immune system detects that pathogen in our body, it just starts producing those antibodies to deal with it.

Allergies occur when our immune system marks something harmless (such as a fragment of peanut) as harmful, and creates a response for it. From now on, our immune system will start fighting fragments of peanuts as fiercely as if it was finding coronaviruses or rhinoviruses or any other pathogen – and depending on how strong your immune system reacts, and how much of the allergen you are exposing your body to, this reaction can go from a mild annoyance to a life-threatening one.

Now, if you are asking _why_ our immune system makes these kind of mistakes… that’s something we don’t know. Understand why it happens and how we can prevent or correct that will probably lead to treatments to prevent or remove allergies.