1. Aim: How can the immune system malfunction?

2. How can your immune system malfunction?
Allergies
Asthma
Autoimmune Disease
Organ
Transplants
Show movie My Girl

3. What is an allergy?
An allergy is a rapid immune system reaction to environmental substances that are normally harmless.
Can you think of materials that can cause allergic reactions?

4. What are things that cause allergies?
Allergens
BEE POLLEN
RAGWEED
MOLD
HOUSE DUST

5. Allergic reactions Antihistamines
Inflammatory response: allergen attaches to WBC which release histamines.
Histamines are chemicals that trigger an inflammatory response (capillaries swell)
Hives, nausea, or shock
What can we take for allergies?
Antihistamines

6. Asthma is an allergic reaction
Allergic reaction that causes your respiratory ducts to swell up.

7. Allergies
Show a movie, My Girl

8. Autoimmune disease
The immune system
fails to distinguish between self & non-self.
The word "auto" is the Greek word for self. In an autoimmune disease, the immune system mistakenly attacks itself, targeting the cells, tissues, and organs of a person's own body (self).

9. Examples of Autoimmune diseases
Multiple Sclerosis (MS)- the immune system attacks the protective coating around nerves, called myelin.

10. Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA)
Joints swell
Pain
Stiffness
Deformity

11. Why are organ transplants difficult?
This is a kidney being removed from a donor
The donor will have its own ID tags on the cell membrane. What are these ID tags called?
Antigens

12. Attack it as if it was a pathogen.
This makes the transplant into another person so difficult.
*Don’t you have these same structures on your cells?
___________
*What will your body do if the antigens aren’t the same as
your own? ___________________________________
*What type of a response is this?__________________
YES
Attack it as if it was a pathogen.
Immune = rejection

13. How will the recipient react?
A transplanted organ is recognized as foreign and is attacked by the immune system (REJECTION).
The chance of REJECTION is less when the donor and recipient are closely related or when anti-rejection medication is used.

14. Why take an immunosuppressant?
It will suppress your immune
system and reduce the chance
of destroying the transplanted
organ.
What is the risk of suppressing
the immune system?
It increases the patient’s risk
for an infection.
Use the bubble boy movie – beginning of the movie