There is a mysterious connection between our skin and courage, especially when it comes to food allergies.
Chronic skin diseases such as eczema are associated with food allergies for reasons that scientists do not fully understand. Although the national prevalence of food allergies in children is only about 8%, the prevalence of children with eczema has risen to 30%. Researchers found that in some cases, eczema can precede food allergies.
Now, a new study led by Yale School of Medicine (YSM) researchers and published in the Journal on April 4 Scientific Immunology A new hypothesis about this link is introduced: In mice, skin lesions can cause food allergies.
Working with mice with different types of skin lesions, including tear and UV damage, scientists found that direct introduction of new food proteins through feeding tubes during skin lesions can cause new food allergies in animals. Food must be new to animals. They are not allergic to foods they have eaten before. And the introduction of allergens (a substance that causes an allergic reaction) occurs within a few hours after skin damage. The food launched the next day seemed to be safe.
Before these findings, it was unclear whether such distant events could occur in the body through the immune system to trigger allergies by triggering allergies.
“It’s a way of thinking, and these things don’t have to happen in the same place in the body.” Dr. Daniel Waizman, a PhD student and lead author of the study at the University of San Francisco, is now a postdoctoral fellow at San Francisco. “We need to take a closer look at how these different organ systems communicate with each other.”
Skin connection
Some speculate that allergens may enter the body through damaged and inflamed skin, leading to allergies, which can lead to allergies containing these allergenic foods that can lead to life-threatening allergic reactions.
However, the idea of these two studies did not sit among the two senior authors of the study – Anna Eisenstein, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Dermatology and Andrew Wang, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Internal Medicine (Rheumatology). Wang and Eisenstein both have young children, and they were relatively new to solid foods when they started their research.
“I chatted with Anna about the concept and agreed that, in general, our kids don’t like to apply food on inflamed and damaged skin because it can hurt,” Wang said. “So the three of us wonder if the immune system can also ‘remember’ what you eat is dangerous and something people may ignore.”
The existence of food allergies is a scientific problem to some extent because, immunologically, the intestine tends to be tolerant. The immune environment in the digestive tract has evolved so we can safely eat a wide variety of foods and allow foreign but beneficial bacteria to live in our intestines. This conundrum can be partially explained if food allergies are actually caused by an immune response in different organs (such as the skin).
The researchers were fed with mice with egg protein, a common food allergen, which includes several skin injuries including puncture wounds and sunburns. Even though different kinds of skin injuries trigger different forms of immune responses, all seem to cause food allergies to egg whites in mice that have never been exposed to the protein before. Exposure to the environment through damaged skin is not necessary because animals exposed to elliptical protein in their environment but do not directly feed the protein.
Scientists have identified several cytokines – cytokines released by the immune system when it is active, which is crucial for the development of egg white allergy. They assume that some form of immune cells is responsible for coordinating signals between the skin and intestine to trigger allergies and are currently working to limit the identity of cells in the cell middle.
Although their findings may be related to treating food allergies in humans, they do remind us not to ignore skin damage, the researchers said. Food allergies are not the only internal disease associated with skin damage. Inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis are also associated with eczema, and the skin disease psoriasis increases the risk of heart disease.
“As a dermatologist, these findings do emphasize the importance of treating inflammation in the skin,” Eisenstein said. “Treatment of skin diseases is not just about treating what you see, but also the potential of treating inflammation and other systemic diseases inside.”
