Why does the immune system react in that way; what causes it to act irregularly when it shouldn’t?
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To explain a cytokine storm, the best analogy is war. Imagine a group of soldiers are trying to defend their country from an invading army. Yet, it’s clear that they are losing this battle. Panicking, they start to release every single robot super soldier they have. The robot super soldiers do take out some of the enemy, but since too many were released, they’ve also burned down every city and village in a thousand miles (which destroyed much of the country’s food and water supplies), and also killed thousands of civilians.
Now, imagine that you are the country, its cities and villages and food and water supplies are your major organs, the soldiers are your immune system, the robot super soldiers are cytokines, the civilians are other cells, and the invading army is whatever organism you’ve been infected with
Why this happens isn’t always entirely clear. Some people are genetically predisposed to having immune systems that overreact this way and there are also types of bacteria, viruses, and cancers that seem especially likely to provoke a cytokine storm. Ebola, for instance, seems to be able to briefly turn off the immune system’s warning system (the dendritic cells) and by the time the immune system realizes what’s happening, it may release a cytokine storm to try and gain the upper hand. (This, BTW, is what causes most of the bleeding in some Ebola patients.)
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