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Autoimmune Iveitis Essay

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Autoimmune uveitis is among the leading causes of blindness. There exist microbes that dwell naturally in our intestines that can be trigger to this disease, and a new study has found that some such microbes produce proteins that candor to harmfully maladjusted immune cells’ entering our eyes.

This notion of intestinal microbes promoting autoimmune uveitis “has been there in the back of our minds,” comments ocular immunologist Andrew Taylor of the Boston University School of Medicine, a scientific bystander. “This is the first time that it’s been shown that gut flora seems to be part of the process.”

In fact, roughly 400,000 people presently in the States have autoimmune uveitis, a disease that sets the body’s means of controlling the immune system, T cells, on a mission to invade the eye and damage its middle layer. T cells are triggered by a special molecule called antigens, and when eye proteins are misidentified as antigens, T cells go haywire and attack. This isn’t an exceptional condition; healthy people possess …show more content…

This lovely cocktail activated the T cells, which means they had become the wrong kind, ready to infect. Caspi’s team suspected a specific protein intestinal microbes release of triggering T cells, so they injected a protein-destroying enzyme to the intestinal cocktail. Afterwards the T cell had a sluggish response to stimuli, which lends weight to the notion of them responding to a protein. Seperately, scientists injected T cells from genetically altered mice into control mice not susceptible to autoimmune uveitis, the hypothesis being that T cells unexposed to intestinal material cannot cause uveitis. However, 86% of the mice developed the disease unless they had not received the major dose of T cells formerly exposed to diseased intestinal contents, reported researchers in Immunity,

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