Not what causes it, but why they have the illness.
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So basically, when your body is infiltrated with something that it feels should not be there, it launches a “counterattack” to fight off the intruders.
Sometimes, our body is mistaken, and it launches this counterattack on something that is not dangerous to our bodies at all, such as strawberries, nuts, or beestings. This is called an allergy. Allergies range from a simple swelling to what we call anaphylactic shock.
Now, you can not be born with an allergy. To become allergic to something, you first have to had come in contact with it at least once. Let’s say a bee stings you for the first time. Your body will sense the bee’s poison and start making proteins to counteract this poison, so called “antibodies”. After the bee sting has passed, these antibodies will remain in our circulation so that the next time you get stung, your body is able to react very quickly.
In some individuals, these antibodies can react so violently, through certain types of white blood cells called Mast Cells, that they cause a release of a hormone called histamine. When this reaction is so violent that the histamine enters the bloodstream and this ends up everywhere, this can cause the body to go into overdrive, because it thinks that it’s being attacked very violently, and so it will launch it’s own counterattack of immense proportions. This is what we call “anaphylactic shock”.
Why some people are more prone to being severely allergic than other individuals is a tricky question. Predisposing factors can be time of first contact with the specimen, genetic factors, mast cell count, or general immune overactivity. There’s not something one can point to and say: “that’s why!”
I research this. It’s not certain why some people are more prone than others. Much of it centers around how many new experiences the immune system had early in life.
Here’s an analogy. It’s very much like developing a phobia. First contact usually involves a perfect storm of unpleasant factors that leads you to associate a normal stimulus as unusually terrible. Then when you see it again, your body overreacts which itself is even more stressful on the body, which makes it think the harmless thing is even worse than originally expected. Anaphylaxis is basically an immune panic attack when the immune system begins to trigger itself, which causes a larger reaction, which causes more immune activation, etc until it becomes an emergency
Part of building immune tolerance requires kids to be exposed to things early, when the immune system is less “fearful” or reactive, so it remembers later in life that just because something’s unusual don’t make it scary. You can desensitize people later on in life but it’s harder
Anything that encourages that feedback loop, whether it’s an abundance of histamine cells, a co infection, or lack of antiinflammatory cells, can all make initial contact go bad or spin things out of control later. Could be genes, could be the gut, could be bad luck
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