The immune system of women with Endometriosis has a significant impact on their symptoms because it is different from that of women without the disease.
If I ask you what the immune system does, you’d probably know that it helps fight off disease. It helps to protect us from microbial pathogens, like viruses and bacteria, as well as foreign substances, like pollen, and cancer cells.
We actually have 2 types of immune responses.
Our primary immune response kicks into gear immediately when a pathogen or substance enters the body. This first line defence is made up of your skin, mucous, saliva, tears, and hydrochloric acid in the stomach.
If the pathogens get through the first line of defence, we’ve got a second immune response, where your body produces specific proteins; specific immune cells; and inflammation.
The secondary immune response is not immediate. It develops when the immune system has ‘learned’ from the primary response that certain pathogens should be fought off. For example, if you have been exposed to a particular cold virus strain, the next time you’re exposed to it, your immune system will have developed specialised T-cells and B-cells to kill that specific strain.
We know that the immune system of women with Endometriosis has some problems:
- Natural killer cells, which are part of both the primary and secondary response, don’t work as well as they should.
- More pro-inflammatory cytokines.
- An excess of T regulatory cells (which suppress the immune response of other cells of the immune system), especially in the pelvic cavity, but they are activated less.
- Auto-antibodies and anti-endometrial antibodies are present, causing a kind of allergy response.
What this means for you is that your immune system is not able to deal properly with bacteria that produce endotoxins (the bad bacteria in your microbiome) and it reacts to endometrial tissue as if it is a dangerous pathogen.
In next week’s post, we’ll look at how this impacts your endometriosis.