How to tell if you have a weak or strong immune system

When you’re under the covers, shivering from the third cold of the year, you may wonder if your immune system is pulling its weight. It’s a question we all would like to answer: is our immune system healthy or not? Now, a growing field of immunology is trying to do just that with tests that “grade” your immune system, the idea being that it can help people predict problems and make lifestyle changes to prevent ill health.

In order to understand how healthy your immune system really is, let alone improve it, it’s helpful to first understand what it actually does. Consider it your own internal army, coordinating different units to eliminate enemy invaders, all while avoiding collateral damage to your tissues and constantly adapting to new challenges.

Just like a real army, your immune system can also fall into disarray, with some units underperforming while others are the most insidious. This can lead to major illnesses.

So how do you tell if your army is doing its best? Let’s start by considering the different components. The first line of defense comes from innate immune cells, such as macrophages, which engulf bacteria and release chemicals that cause inflammation, making the cells less hospitable to pathogens.

Once a threat is identified, a second line of defense called the adaptive immune system kicks in with more specialized tools. B-cells, for example, produce antibodies that bind to the unwanted newcomer and render it harmless. T-cells, on the other hand, kill cells that attack infected cells, as well as helper cells that coordinate the activities of other immune cells and help B cells produce antibodies. Regulatory T-cells are also available to stop the fight once the threat has passed so the body can repair the damage.

Our biological warriors can be found lurking around the body. “They’re in the lining of our respiratory tract, in our digestive tract, and on our skin, wherever things can get in that can upset the body,” he says. Jenna MacciochiImmunologist at the University of Sussex in the UK.

It is also helped by the microorganisms in the body, known as the microbiome. “We often think of the microbiome in relation to the gut, but the microbiota lives all over our body,” says Macciochi.

When we’re at peak health, these different components are perfectly balanced, but there are ways things can go wrong. You may lack the friendly microbes that protect your digestive system, which means you’re more susceptible to gut infections. A poor diet or stress can slow down your production of the right immune cells to fight infection, and after recovery, you can lose cells that “remember” the pathogen should you be exposed to it again. Since the immune system can also recognize and eliminate tumors, a deficiency can lead to an increased risk of cancer.

Other problems arise from overactivity, when the immune system begins to act with excessive force, causing damage to the body. For example, the immune system can become oversensitive to foreign bodies that pose no real threat, such as pollen, which can lead to allergies. Or it may begin to attack his own organs, causing autoimmune diseases. Even long-term silenced immune activity, such as low-grade inflammation, can be harmful and is believed to cause cardiovascular disease and stroke. depression.

Historically, there have been a few basic ways to assess the health of your immune system, including, for example, measuring the levels of inflammatory molecules and the number of immune cells in the blood. But recently, our measures have become more sophisticated, focusing more on analyzing the precise balance of the different components of the immune system.

By Sunil Ahuja The team at the University of Texas Health Science Center, for example, has designed a way to classify people’s “immune status” based on the relative levels of different T-cells. People with higher numbers of helper T cells, combined with lower levels of killer T cells, had the highest immune levels, according to their classification. The team has shown that People with immune level I tend to have much better results when dealing with a pathogenThere was an 88 percent reduction in mortality after a covid-19 infection compared to those with lower grades, for example.

Importantly, group ratings are a better predictor of response to covid-19 than age alone, which means that, in the future, this type of measure could help identify high-risk individuals more accurately. “Even if you’re 80 years old and have a high immune level, you’re going to do a lot better than someone much younger with a low immune level,” says Ahuja.

It may take a while before your doctor is able to assess your health with this accuracy, but you can get a good idea of ​​the state of your immune system without testing. As a general rule, Macciochi says the average person should expect to have one or two mild illnesses a year. If you get sick much more often, and those infections last much longer and are more severe than the people around you, it may be a sign that one or more of the units in your immune system are malfunctioning. as they should Your doctor should be your first visit, but there are also things you can do to support your immunity (see “Food and drink that can boost your immune system,” above).