Search for tag: "immune"

Dr. Tarbox: Hello and welcome to "Skincast," the podcast for people who want to learn how to take the very best care of the skin they're in. My name is Michelle Tarbox. I'm an academic dermatologist and dermatopathologist at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in beautiful sunny Lubbock, Texas. And joining me is . . .

Dr. Johnson: Hello, everybody. My name is Dr. Luke Johnson. I'm a pediatric dermatologist and a general dermatologist with the University of Utah. And I'm itching to talk about some interesting subjects today.

Dr. Tarbox: Ba-dah-bum-bum. I love that. So, Luke, we're going to talk about itch today. Basically, we're going to talk about why we itch and maybe how to do something about that.

So why do we itch? Our skin is really a giant sense organ, and its biggest job, really, is to protect us from external threats. And really, any sensation in our body that's uncomfortable for us, anything we want to avoid in medicine, we call these nociceptive things, like pain or itch, are really there to protect us from potential harm. It is actually transmitted by a subclass of the same nerves that transmit pain.

So it's, like pain, a protective response and it's there to help us notice if, for example, there's a bug feeding on us, or if a parasite is attached to us, or maybe if we've got a skin infection, or we've come in contact with something like poison ivy or irritating plants that need to be removed from the skin.

So it can be helpful in the acute setting when we can maybe do something about it, like swat that mosquito, pull off that tick, or wash off the area skin that's infected and maybe treat it with something. It's also there to help us know when our skin barrier, that final frontier between us and the rest of the world, has a breach or is damaged.

Dr. Johnson: Why do I feel itchy just because you're talking about itch, Michelle? That doesn't seem right.

Dr. Tarbox: That's a great question. So the sensation of itch actually can be triggered by many things, one of which is our own imagination. So, if you think hard enough about being itchy, or if somebody around you says, "Oh, my dog has fleas" . . . As a dermatologist, we run into this when we treat patients who have the human itch mite scabies. We start to itch almost immediately after we recognize the other patient might have scabies because psychologically we connect that exposure to the risk of itching.

Dr. Johnson: That's something my assistants always say whenever we see a patient with scabies. We go back into our workroom and say, "Oh, I just feel so itchy right now."

Dr. Tarbox: Exactly.

Dr. Johnson: Does it work in reverse, though? Can I think myself out of being itchy?

Interviewer: The highest risk factor for becoming hospitalized and suffering the worst effects of COVID-19 is being 65 and older. We're with gerontologist Dr. Mark Supiano, who is the Dhief of the Division of Geriatrics at U of U Health. Let's start out with the question, why is that?

Dr. Supiano: We do know that there are underlying changes in the immune system in an older person that puts them more at risk of getting an infection. They cannot mount the same immune defenses to fight it off. So that's first. Secondly, there are other physiologic changes in the lungs and the heart, in other responses to an infection that put older people at risk for more complications. So they don't have the functional reserves to compensate for the devastating effects of the COVID infection itself.

Interviewer: In addition to the immune system changes, which apparently starts at 65, is that what you're saying or ish?

Dr. Supiano: Yes. It's not a hard and fast number, but the older you are, the more likely those changes will be present.

Interviewer: Got you. So it's a linear kind of a decline.

Dr. Supiano: Yeah.

Interviewer: All right. In addition to that, are there other reasons why individuals over 65 are more likely to get COVID-19 and suffer the worst effects from it?

Dr. Supiano: I think related to that, and particularly as you go up in years above the age of 65, so it's a very heterogeneous group, but for 75 and older, or particularly 85 and older, the likelihood that you have multiple chronic conditions that are also associated with higher risk of COVID, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, renal disease, those other risk factors can accumulate. And the more risk factors you have the higher your risk would be.

Interviewer: So it sounds like if I have a mother or a grandfather that has some of those conditions and they're over 65, I might want to take additional precautions than perhaps if my parent was healthy?

Dr. Supiano: Exactly.

Interviewer: But still over 65, that in and of itself.

Dr. Supiano: Even without those underlying conditions, the current information suggests that just age 65 and higher, again, the higher, the more risk, but that age alone would be a significant high-risk factor.

Interviewer: How about the symptoms for people that are 65 and older for COVID-19? Are they the typical symptoms that we see in other people?

Dr. Supiano: So they can be. So the most common symptoms would include fever, cough, fatigue, or loss of energy, sometimes diarrhea. Those are the most common symptoms that have been reported. But as is true with many other infections in older populations, there's more often unusual presentations of that infection. So, for example, there may not be a fever. So older people may not mount a fever in response to the infection. So the absence of a fever should not make you think that the COVID is not a possibility.

Another possibility is that someone who presents with confusion or an acute change in their mental status, that in fact could be a presenting symptom of COVID. There's also evidence to suggest that an unusual symptom of losing taste or smell could be the first presenting symptom of COVID. So we need to have a heightened level of awareness for unusual ways that COVID might present in an older adult.

Interviewer: But the trick there to me is how do you differentiate that from just part of the normal aging process? If I understand correctly, loss of taste and smell, kind of common when you start getting older. Confusion can start developing when you get older. How do you determine if it's COVID or not?

Dr. Supiano: So it's really separating out what we would think about as being usual aging from a potential infection, and the general rule of thumb that I use and I teach our trainees is that age alone is almost never the answer, right? If someone's coming with some new concern or complaint, we need to think it's our job to find out what's going on, and in this case, have a very low threshold to think, is this possibly related to COVID?

Interviewer: If somebody in your life who is 65 or older then develops one of these COVID symptoms, whether normal or not quite as normal, what should you do at that point? Should you get to the hospital immediately? I suppose a test probably would be the first thing.

Dr. Supiano: So I think the first . . . exactly, Scot. And fortunately, with our health system now is very well-equipped to evaluate people with potential COVID-related illness in an environment actually outside of the hospital. We really don't want you bringing that patient into our clinic or directly into the emergency room. They should be evaluated at one of the testing centers where there's the outdoor testing facility. You don't have to leave your car, get the tests done. Then if further evaluation needs to be done, certainly going to urgent care or an emergency room that's equipped to appropriately isolate and manage someone as a potential COVID infection and has the appropriate personal protective equipment and so forth to also protect the other staff and other patients.

Interviewer: Of course, if you have severe symptoms, difficulty breathing, any of that sort of stuff, then . . .

Dr. Supiano: Do not pass go.

Interviewer: Yes.

Dr. Supiano: Yes, go straight to the emergency room.

Interviewer: All right. You're the expert. I always love to ask this last question when I've got an expert here behind the microphone. What's the one thing, when we're done talking, that you would want someone to take away from our conversation?

Dr. Supiano: Wash your hands. No, seriously, I think the main point is that people 65 and older are considered high-risk, and high-risk individuals need to be extremely vigilant about maintaining these precautions, hand washing being one of them, but maintaining physical distance, wearing a mask, minimizing your exposure. All of the things that are on that list, we need to not let down our guard and not be complacent. We need to keep up with those protective measures if we're going to get through this.

Interviewer: And as a loved one, also do those same things to protect those that I love.

Dr. Supiano: Exactly.

Dr. Gellner: We all wish our immune system was better than it is sometimes, especially, with our kids and how often they get sick. Pediatricians get asked about immune system boosters all the time. I'll let you know the top three questions and whether they are fact or fiction on today's Scope. I'm Dr. Cindy Gellner.

Announcer: Remember that one thing, that one person told you, that one time, about what you should or shouldn't do with raising your kids? Find out if it's true or not, this is Debunking Old Wives Tales with Dr. Cindy Gellner on the Scope.

Dr. Gellner: Our immune systems are the soldiers that fight off germs. Sounds simple, right? But what we do, can have a big impact on those soldiers. Parents often want pediatricians to reinforce to kids that eating fruits and veggies keeps our immune system strong. This one's a fact. So, when you're serving them to your kids, you're giving their immune system nutrients that fight viruses and bacteria, remind them about how strong their bodies will be.

What about the advice that getting enough sleep, affects your immune system? This one is true also. There's a strong link between getting restorative sleep which is getting enough sleep for the body to do its work with growing and fighting off illness. With school schedules keeping kids up later and making them get up earlier for school sometimes, or kids who don't keep a sleep schedule at all during the summer, kids build up sleep debt, and they can't make that up with naps or sleeping in on weekends. Sticking to a good consistent sleep schedule is what helps the most.

A lot of parents ask about supplements that can boost their child's immune system. Giving your child extra vitamins and minerals will help them stay healthy, right? That one's a myth. Giving your picky or junk food eater a multivitamin is a good idea to help them stay healthy, but they haven't been proven to help the immune system. Even vitamin C can only help so much. Remember even though vitamins and supplements are over the counter, they are still drugs. And if you give your child too much, they can be harmful.

While I wished there was a prescription I can give my patients to make their immune system strong enough to fight off every illness because I'd give it to my kids and I'd take it myself, there is no magic medicine. What is really going to help your child's immune system, is making sure they are rested and eat healthy.

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Dr. Gellner: You just learned that your child has type 1 diabetes, or you're worried that your child might have it. That's a scary diagnosis for any parent to consider. What you really need to know on today's Scope. I'm Dr. Cindy Gellner.

Announcer: Keep your kids healthy and happy. You are now entering "The Healthy Kids Zone," with Dr. Cindy Gellner on The Scope.

Dr. Gellner: Every year in the United States, 13,000 children are diagnosed, and more than 1 million American kids and adults deal with this condition every day. In type 1 diabetes, your child's own immune system attacks and destroys the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. Once those cells are destroyed, they won't ever make insulin again. Although no one knows for certain why this happens, scientists think it's a combination of genetics and other external factors combined that triggered this immune system reaction.

Type 1 diabetes cannot be prevented, and there's no real way to predict who will get it. Parents often feel guilty that they've done something to cause this, but parents need to understand it's nothing they did. Unfortunately, type 1 diabetes is a lifelong condition. Kids and teens with type 1 diabetes will depend on daily insulin shots or an insulin pump to control their blood sugar levels.

Parents often ask me to check their children for diabetes because their children drink all the time and urinate all the time. It's an excessive amount of drinking that we often see and the urination isn't just drops of pee in the toilet. It's a full bladder of urine. Kids who have long been potty trained and have never wet the bed all of a sudden start to have accidents day or night. Kids will often seem to eat a ton as well and never gain weight, or they might actually lose weight.

Now, parents all the time are concerned that their child isn't eating like they should, but it's what happens on the growth curves that lets pediatricians know if this is a normal phase that kids go through, or if it's something more worrisome. Sometimes, these symptoms are easily identified and pediatricians catch the disease early with a simple finger stick to check your child's sugar level.

If diabetes isn't caught, chemicals called ketones can build up in your child's blood and cause stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, fruity smelly breath, breathing problems, and even loss of consciousness. This is a serious condition called diabetic ketoacidosis, and it requires fast action in the emergency room to correct. The good news is that treating diabetes and keeping your child's sugar level in check can help prevent long-term damage seen in adults, especially to the heart, eyes, and kidneys.

The bad news is there are going to be a lot of needles to do this. Your child will need to learn to check their blood sugar levels several times a day and give themselves insulin shots since their bodies aren't making it anymore. They need to eat a healthy diet low in carbohydrates and sugars. And we all know that's a challenge for anyone, especially a kid.

You and your child will start seeing a doctor called an endocrinologist. This is a pediatrician with additional training in hormone issues, including diabetes. The endocrinologist, you, and your child will all work together to come up with a plan on how to keep your child's diabetes in check. Living with diabetes is a challenge no matter what age a person is, but young kids and teens often have special issues to deal with. They may have a hard time understanding why they need so many needles, why can't they eat what their friends are, why did this happen to them.

If you have a teen with diabetes, they may feel different from their peers, and they may want to live a more spontaneous lifestyle than their diabetes allows. Not to mention that puberty hormones can make diabetes control even harder. Having a child with diabetes can seem overwhelming at times, but you're not alone. Your child's diabetes care team is not only a great resource for the medical side of things but also for support and helping you and your child cope with this long-term condition.

Until scientists have figured out a better way to treat, and possibly defeat diabetes, you as a parent can help your child lead a happy, healthy life, by giving constant encouragement, and helping them stay on top of their blood sugar control every day. This will let your kids do all the things that the other kids do and remind them to enjoy being a kid instead of feeling like a pin cushion.

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Interviewer: The quest for a better cancer vaccine. We'll talk about that next on The Scope.

Announcer: Examining the latest research and telling you about the latest breakthroughs. The Science and Research show is on The Scope.

Interviewer: I'm talking with Dr. Mingnan Chen, Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Utah. And with his graduate student Peng Zhao, he's co-author of a new study on developing a vaccine system that could one day be used against cancers and other disorders. So vaccines against cancer, I think that's a concept that a lot of people are still trying to understand. Dr. Chen, can you explain what that is?

Dr. Chen: Yes. Our body actually has a well-fired system to protect us and immune system to protect us from cancer or various infections. However this system, by nature, is not strong enough. So we want to actually use the vaccine to boost these immune responses so we can use these immune responses against cancer. One step further we are here trying to develop the vaccine delivery and the adjuvant system, to further enhance the effectiveness of the vaccines. So then we can use it to prevent the cancer or to treat the cancer if someone gets cancer.

Interviewer: So how does the vaccine work? Is it different from, say, a flu vaccine?

Dr. Chen: Largely, it is the same as a flu vaccine. So if we know a group of people who may have a high risk of some type of cancer, like breast cancer, we can give this group of people breast cancer vaccines. So later on this vaccine will protect these people from developing breast cancer. Or we can use it as a treatment, say if a person develops breast cancer, we can use the vaccine together with surgery to treat breast cancer, to prevent the metastasis, or to prevent recurrence of breast cancer.

Interviewer: What is the vaccine made from?

Dr. Chen: The vaccine can be made from cancer cells, can be made with protein from the cancers, or from peptide from cancers. In our specific case we used peptide from cancers. This peptide will be presented by the cancer cells, sort of as the label for the cancer cells. We deliver this vaccine to our bodies so our immune system can recognize the cells with this kind of label.

Interviewer: So you're kind of teaching the immune cells how to attack that cancer?

Dr. Chen: Yes. Yes. We are teaching the immune cells. We are also using this vaccine to boost the immune cells that can attack this type of cancer cells.

Interviewer: Now obviously it's not so easy or else some of us would be getting these vaccines already. So what's kind of the tricky part in developing these vaccines?

Dr. Chen: The tricky part of the vaccine, first, is efficacy. The second is safety. The third is cost. So for the efficacy. Right now, the cancer vaccine, there's still quite a large number of clinical trials on the cancer vaccines.

However, right now there are only two of them that have been actually approved for clinical use. So we want to use this very unique vaccine delivery and adjuvant system to drastically boost the effectiveness of the cancer vaccine so it can actually show the effect in the clinics. On top of that, our vaccine delivery system also has advantage in terms of safety and in terms of preparation. So it could have a very low cost to produce this type of vaccine.

Interviewer: Some of your research is focusing on optimizing this delivery and adjuvant system. Peng, could you give me a basic idea of what that is?

Peng: The basis of the delivery system, we're using a nanoparticle based system to deliver the vaccine. Comparing to the flu vaccine, which usually are delivered by peptide, this nanoparticle delivery is actually preferred by immune cells. So the uptake is actually better.

Second, and more important, we can incorporate different abnormalities with the vaccine. In nanoparticle, just by one protein, one peptide. So it kind of addresses a problem other people cannot address. So when we are incorporating abnormalities there together, they work together to immediately show effect. Other people they have to mix it, which, generally speaking, is not that effective. That's the basis of our delivery system.

Interviewer: The nanoparticle, what does that do? Does it help stabilize the vaccine?

Peng: There are multiple views of it. So peptide is much smaller than a nanoparticle. So when we inject them they diffuse everywhere, so it's kind of like the efficiency of the immune cell to take the peptide is low. Immune cells are not designed to do that. Think about, immune cells naturally like particles like viruses, bacteria. So if you put peptides on some particle, artificial particle, it will help the immune cell to recognize them, and it gets them.

Interviewer: But it turns out you can get the particle to the immune cells, but that's only half the battle.

Peng: For a vaccine to work, after they are taken by the cells they need to be processed in order to be recognized before they are presented. So our particle actually has this responsive characteristic, which means when they are taken into the cell they can dissociate and they release the peptide for the cell to further present to other immune cells.

Dr. Chen: So we said that this system has a very good contrast of changeable stability. When we want them to be stable, they are very stable. And when we want them to become unstable, they become unstable.

Interviewer: Do you intend to take this to clinical trials?

Dr. Chen: Yes. Bringing a vaccine delivery system from benchside to bedside has been our goal from the very beginning of this project. When we set out to develop this vaccine delivery and adjuvant system about four years ago. One of the most important criteria that we had was that this system has to be biocompatible and immune compatible not only to mouse but also to human beings. So then we could actually test this system preclinically in animal models, which is very important, but also clinically in human beings.

Now that we have this system we are very excited about the idea that this system could benefit patients in the near future. We are working very hard to push this system forward so this system can be tested clinically. First we are testing this system in animal melanoma models. The results are very exciting and promising now because this system did enhance the anti-melanoma immune responses. Second, we are continuing to finesse this system so this system will have the capacity to overcome the multiple barriers that are facing cancer vaccines. So, hopefully we can bring up an even stronger delivery system so that this system will have a high likelihood to be successful in the clinic.

Lastly I want to mention that we have the intellectual properties for the system. We are looking for investments that can help us bring this system from our benchside to the hospital bedside.

Announcer: Interesting. Informative. And all in the name of better health. This is The Scope Health Sciences Radio.

Interviewer: A new study is suggesting that watching funny cat videos can help expand your life expectancy. But there are a lot of funny videos, lots of cats, and lots of funny videos of cats. Which ones are the most beneficial to watch if you want to live a long and healthy life? This is coming up next on The Scope.

Announcer: Covering all aspects of women's health. This is "The Seven Domains of Women's Health" with Dr. Kirtly Jones on The Scope.

Interviewer: It's been said that laughing has great effects in life. Not only does it reduce blood pressure but it helps with stress and anxiety. Unless you're allergic to happiness, laughing just makes you happier. It's just that simple. But a new study out today is suggesting that laughter from watching a funny cat video not only brightens your day but it can actually help you live a healthier, longer life. Dr. Kirtly Jones is a woman's health expert and she knows all too well that emotional health is a key component of overall good health. But Dr. Jones, the study is telling me that even if I'm not a cat person, watching a funny video of a cat can help with my health. What's going on here? Let's talk about this.

Dr. Jones: Well, actually, there's been a great deal of research about funny cat videos and overall health. And it's important to know that various studies have shown that not only does it help your immune health, and we can talk about that, your cardiovascular health, and most importantly your emotional health. There are some caveats, though, some important things to know.

First of all, some of the early studies had men and women in the same group and those studies weren't as strong. You really have to separate men out because men watching videos, they really only laugh at videos of other men expressing gas or doing something incredibly stupid. So we really need to focus just on women.

Interviewer: Just on us?

Dr. Jones: Just the women. Now, secondly, you have to really identify women who identify with cats because so they did study comparing cat videos with dog videos and lo and behold, there was a subset of people who responded well to dog videos and not cat videos. So they separate them out by a questionnaire. The questionnaire had two questions: one, I think cats are incredibly adorable; and two, I think cats are useless bird killers. And if they separated out the women who responded that they thought that cats were useless bird killers, then the adorable cat lovers were perfect for studying. So indeed, in those women who watched cat videos then there were benefits in a wonderful number of domains. Let's talk about those a little bit.

Interviewer: Okay, yes. Let's break this down to health benefits. So if I want good cardio health but I hate cardio activities like running, cycling, the elliptical stairs, I hate it all, what's my alternative?

Dr. Jones: There's some very good evidence that watching cat videos and laughing is exercise because laughing is exercise. So looking at longer videos, 90-minute videos, you can increase your heart rate and you can increase your respiration and that's really wonderful and you return to baseline very quickly. So 90 minutes might give you an extra 10 calories. Now, a two-minute video doesn't have much cardiovascular benefit, but most people watch their cat video at least 10 times.

So the 10 times , times 2 calories, and then if you get up and have to go pee, which you will, if you keep laughing if you're a woman, so you're going to have to go pee a little bit and come back, you can get to 10 calories by watching it 10 times.

Interviewer: Okay. So now my cardio is good, but if my immune system is kind of just out of whack and I get sick every week, besides drowning my body in orange juice and eating an apple a day, what else can I do to maybe only get sick every other week?

Dr. Jones: There's some very, very good evidence on cat videos and immune function. So they have to laugh and that's important because some cat videos don't make people laugh. If you laugh, then that increases your salivary IgA. Also, laughing makes your killer T-cells, cells that help fight viruses and tumors, be more active. And that's been shown in men who watch videos . . . I can't really discuss about the kind of videos they're watching and laughing at, but for the women and cat videos, their T-cell function worked better. So also, watching cat videos calms people, particularly kitty videos. So if you're watching kiddy, K-I-D-DY and kitty, K-I-T-T-Y, putting them together makes people's cortisols drop and they feel much calmer.

Interviewer: And that in return helps my immune system.

Dr. Jones: Absolutely.

Interviewer: Okay. So because we're talking about women, beauty comes to mind, is there a cat video I can watch to maybe enhance my natural beauty? I mean, if I can deal without my current beauty products, I want to do it without them.

Dr. Jones: Oh great, right. Well, first of all, it's important to understand the smile. Now, you may not have your skin tone be that much more beautiful, but if you have a natural smile and practice your natural smile, you will be much more attractive to others. So practicing that smile, but it has to be a real smile so what they call the Duchenne smile, which involves your facial muscles and your eye muscles, not what they used to call the Pan Am smile or the . . .

Interviewer: Like the Hunger Games smile.

Dr. Jones: The Hunger Games, right. Right. Or the Botox smile. So in fact, it's not so much that your beauty itself and your skin tone, but when you smile, you look more beautiful and practicing your smiles. You practice your smiles in front of the mirror when you're looking at yourself, but the real smile, the Duchenne, named after a very famous neurologist, that reaches your eyes which you only get watching cat videos. So practice those cat videos and your smile will be much more natural.

Interviewer: Remembering all this is going to just stress me out. I'm just going to get stress anxiety because I have to remember every single cat videos that you're telling me about.

Dr. Jones: Think about that "aw". What makes you go "aw"? and there's a cat video for stress relieve as well and this is any video with a cat and a toddler. So if you just Google or go to YouTube and put in "cats and toddlers," you will have definitely an option for stressing out.

Interviewer: It's cuteness overload.

Dr. Jones: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Interviewer: Okay. All right, all right. I don't suppose there's anything that's going to give me abs, is there? Or that just seems way too much now?

Dr. Jones: No, no. Nothing but ab workouts are going to make your abs. But if you want to get rid of that bloating feeling, that unwanted water in your system, you can try watching videso of cat ambushes.

Interviewer: Cat ambushes.

Dr. Jones: Now you may be passing gas when that happens. So if you're startled, but if you have a certain way that you respond to cats ambushing other cats or human beings or birds, anything really of an ambush, you may actually . . . it may help with the bloating.

Interviewer: Earlier, you mentioned that watching kitty videos helps regulate my immune system. What about allergies? Is there anything I can watch to calm them down, keep them at bay?

Dr. Jones: Sometimes, your allergies are an overwork of your immune system. So allergies are complicated and it gets their own category of cat video. I always prescribe the cat cucumber video for people who say that they have allergies, their eyes get red and puffy, they feel kind of puffy in the springtime, that's the perfect video for allergy symptoms.

Interviewer: What if I'm allergic to cats themselves?

Dr. Jones: Well, that's no problem because cat videos had been proven to be hypoallergenic, safe for all ages and persons.

Interviewer: Okay. What about pain? If I'm dying of pain, can a cat video help me?

Dr. Jones: No, Chloe. If you're in pain, you need to see a doctor.

Interviewer: Okay. That's fine. I'm just checking because there seems to be a cat video for everything. Okay, no cat videos for pain relief.

Dr. Jones: Well, that's not exactly true in people with chronic pain. So acute pain, no. So if you ruptured your appendix, I strongly recommend . . .

Interviewer: I got to go see a doctor.

Dr. Jones: That you see the doctor. However, chronic pain, back pain, laughing at videos and the "aw" of cats and babies decreases the sensation of chronic pain, back pain, fibromyalgia, that kind of thing. It just calms . . .

Interviewer: It just calms me down.

Dr. Jones: It calms you down, decreases, and especially as you watch it over and over, you'll feel more calm. As you search the Internet more broadly for even more cat videos, you'll find you won't be thinking about your pain at all.

Interviewer: Okay. Now, this just sounds ridiculous now at this point. Are we . . . Is this study even real or what's going on? Because I feel like you're just playing with me here. Can cat videos actually help me live a longer life?

Dr. Jones: Sorry. Sorry, Chloe.

Interviewer: What's going on? You're laughing? You're laughing and I know why. I know why you're laughing. It's because we just played a prank on everybody. April Fools. Watching cat videos does not help you live a long and healthy life. But, Dr. Jones, tell everybody what does.

Dr. Jones: Laughing is good for you. Those things I said about laughing have been studied in looking at funny videos versus videos, watching, telling you how to repair your vacuum cleaner so people who watch funny videos versus that instructional videos actually do have an improvement in their immune function, a decrease in chronic pain and improvement in their cardiovascular response. And smiling the real smile, not the Botox smile, actually improves not only your sense of wellbeing but those around you. So on this April Fool's Day, I hope everybody gets a smile.

Announcer: TheScopeRadio.com is University of Utah Health Sciences radio. If you like what you heard, be sure to get our latest content by following us on Facebook. Just click on the Facebook icon at TheScopeRadio.com.

Interviewer: A study gives new insights into how good bacteria work with our body to promote digestive health - up next on The Scope.

Announcer: Examining the latest research and telling you about the latest breakthroughs. "The Science and Research Show" is on The Scope.

Interviewer: A study published in Cell Host and Microbe is causing us to rethink what the immune system can do, and how it interacts with the good bacteria that live on our bodies. I'm talking with three authors on the study: senior author June Round, assistant professor of Pharmacology at the University of Utah, and co-first authors Jason Kubinak, and Charisse Peterson.
Dr. Round, what's the take home message from what you found in your study?

Dr. Round: I think the most important thing and the most interesting thing about this particular study is that it really highlights that there is a conversation between our immune system and the microbes that live on our body. It's becoming more and more clear that these microbes are very important for our health, and there's a lot of factors that shape what types of microbes can live on our bodies.
This study really highlights that our immune system has an effect on those types of microbes and that the microbes can send signals that tell our immune system how to develop, and in turn our immune system, as its developing, can also shape the types of microbes and the types of things that those microbes express.

Interviewer: Dr. Kubinak, how does that change our thinking from how we considered our microbiome before?

Dr. Kubinak: Well, I think within the last 10 years there's been a pretty significant shift in the way we view our interaction with the microbial world from initially primarily focused on antagonistic interactions where hosts and their immune systems were focused on eradicating and eliminating pathogens that make us sick. Whereas now, I think there's a renewed interest in the interaction between the hosts and microbes and how it promotes, or facilitates host health. I think our story sort of gets at that by demonstrating that the crosstalk between host and microbe generally is a health-promoting interaction.

Interviewer: So your work, in particular, addresses how the body keeps its balance of species of good bacteria intact, and you're particularly looking at one protein called MyD88. What did we know about this protein before your research?

Dr. Round: Its original function was assigned to recognize pathogenic organisms and basically act as the frontline detection to tell our immune system, "There is something going on here, there is a microbe here, so we better turn on our immune response and get rid of the pathogens." What we're really showing here is something very different, that detecting the microbe doesn't necessarily get rid of it here. It's actually helping to shape the types of organisms that live in the gut.

Interviewer: So how did you come to that conclusion?

Dr. Peterson: What did was we created a mouse that specifically knocked out this protein within a specific immune cell called a T cell. Then it gave us a unique opportunity to ask, what happens when this protein is absent in this immune cell and how does that affect the development of the microbiota as a whole in these animals.

Interviewer: So when MyD88 was knocked out of the immune system, it basically lead to an imbalance of the communities, the different species of bacteria in the gut. What does that do to the mouse, itself?

Dr. Round: What this lead to was that the animals themselves were more susceptible to inflammatory bowel disease, or an experimental model of inflammatory bowel disease.

Interviewer: I don't want to get too graphic, but what does that look like in a mouse?

Dr. Round: It's just inflammation within the guts of these animals. They lose weight.

Dr. Peterson: They get a severe wasting disease, and they get diarrhea.

Dr. Round: I think, for me, the most exciting part of the experiments was when we realized that this sensitivity to inflammatory bowel disease wasn't necessarily just caused by this defect that we had created in the host's immune system. One of the things that was driving this was actually this imbalance within the gut. Our ability to rescue that just by giving these mice healthy microbiota and rescue their disease susceptibility was, to me, the most exciting finding.

Interviewer: What do you mean? How did you fix the illness?

Dr. Peterson: So many people would refer to this as a fecal transplant. In the lab, we call this a microbiota transplant. You basically get rid of all those bad bugs that have developed in that animal because of their genetic deficiency and you replace them a healthy or with a balanced microbiota, so it's really a microbiota transplant. Obviously this is something that is starting to be done in people with various infections within their guts.

Interviewer: Well, right. I have to say, when I started talking about your work with other people in the office, that everyone became really excited when I said that I was going to be talking to you about fecal transplants, which sounds kind of strange. But, it's kind of this new exciting therapy that seems to have some pretty striking results in people as well.

Dr. Round: I'm glad to hear that people are excited about fecal transplants as, maybe disgusting as they sound. But to me, it makes sense. We have evolved for a very long time with these organisms, they promote our health, they're beneficial to us. So instead of using something that we chemically synthesized that's not natural, we're now using the microbiota as kind of a natural therapy to restore the balance in our bodies. So I think this is really a viable therapy in the future for multiple diseases, not just for inflammatory bowel disease.

Interviewer: I think one of the interesting parts of this study is that it really suggests that there is kind of a co-evolution between the microbiome and ourselves. How do you think about that?

Dr. Kubinak: To me, it speaks to the nature of natural selection to have driven the evolution of immune system machinery to promote benign symbiosis between us and our microbes.

Interviewer: So they're helping us, but we're also finding ways to help them.

Dr. Kubinak: Yeah, I think so. I think our immune systems have developed ways to definitely skew the community toward the presence of individuals who at the very least, are not going to cause us harm.

Announcer: Interesting. Informative. And all in the name of better health. This is The Scope Health Sciences Radio.

Dr. Kirtly Parker Jones: "Don't put that in your mouth." How often have we said that our babies on the floor, who picked up the dog's bone and starts to chew on it? We try to keep our infants safe from diseases by keeping them away from anything dirty, by keeping their environment ultra clean. But maybe a little dirt in our infant's beginnings helps them in the future life. This is Dr. Kirtly Jones from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University Healthcare, and this is the down and dirty about babies and allergies today on The Scope.

Announcer: Medical news and research from the University of Utah physicians and specialists you can use for a happier and healthier life. You're listening to The Scope.

Dr. Kirtly Parker Jones: How does our body learn what the immune system should fight off and what it should accept? The immune starts developing in the womb, but the real work begins at delivery. The bacteria that are very important and populating the newborn's gut comes from the mother's vaginal flora and her skin, and the bacteria the baby experiences is in early life.
Having a lot of different bacteria is a good thing. Babies born by a Caesarean section without labor have more asthma, more autoimmune diseases, and eczema. But what about after birth? We evolved our immune system by living in the dirt, not with hand sanitizer. It's a good thing not to be allergic to your environment, so what is the evidence that we should let our babies suck on their pacifier when it falls in the dirt or chew on the dog's bone? Today, we're going to talk about babies and allergies.
It's long been known that many of the autoimmune diseases that we see in the U.S.; asthma, eczema, autoimmune colitis like Crohn's Disease are very rare in third world countries or, to be politically correct, developing countries. A mounting body of research suggests that exposing infants to germs may offer them greater protection from illnesses such as allergies and asthma later on in life. There's something called the Hygiene Hypothesis which holds that when exposure to parasites, bacteria, and viruses is limited early in life, children face a greater chance of having allergies, asthma, and other diseases later in adulthood. In fact, kids with older siblings who grow up on a farm or who attended daycare early in life seem to show lower rates of allergies.
Just as a baby's brain needs stimulation, input, and interaction to develop normally, the new research is read to your kid from birth, not just put them in front of the TV, the young immune system is strengthened by exposure to everyday germs so that it can learn, adapt, and regulate itself.
It's been observed that infants from farm families, especially those with older siblings, have much less asthma and allergies to pets or other animals. I think old siblings thing is that the older sibling puts their dirty hands on the infant, and this is not such a bad thing, as it turns out. It is innate behavior of infants to pick up everything and put it in their mouths, including their hands, their feet, and anything they can reach. Well, maybe there's a reason for that. They aren't hungry, and adults don't do that. Even children over 3 don't do that anymore. So maybe they are priming their gut with bacteria to help them later in life. That's just a guess.
Recently, it's been shown that bacteria in the newborn's gut are important in regulating the developing immune system. And finally, a new study from John Hopkins looked at asthma in inner city children. Infants were followed from birth to 3 years. Now, we know inner city children have high rates of asthma and triggers include cockroach droppings, mouse, and cat dander. So they tested these children and their homes for these exposures as well as doing a quote "bacterial analysis" of their home. Infants who were exposed to cockroach droppings, mouse, and cat dander and a wide variety of bacteria had a 17% incidence of wheezing by age 3 compared to 51% of wheezing in kids who weren't exposed to these factors as infants. Wheezing in early childhood can be a sign of future asthma in children. The important and curious fact is the exposure has to happen in the first year of life to be protected.
We know that our fear of germs and our babies comes from the knowledge that around the world, the number one killer of newborns is infectious diarrhea from unclean water, so we don't want to expose our kids to bacteria and unclean water and from people who are sick. These germs are sick people germs, not from the environment. We should take care about exposing our infants to people with diarrhea and upper respiratory tract infection, but I'm talking about crawling in the dirt.
So what should we do as moms and grandmas? If the child is otherwise healthy and doesn't already have a compromised immune system from disease, its okay to let the dog lick the baby's face, and the binky doesn't have to be sterilized if it drops in the dirt. Let the infant sit or lay on the ground or the floor. A little dirt won't hurt her none. So that's the down and dirty about babies and their developing immune systems. Stay tuned because this is an area of research that's growing very quickly, and thanks for joining us on The Scope.

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