The end of the rains and the arrival of good weather have, for many, a dark back: allergies. Spring, and especially the months of May and June, brings us the pollen proliferationone of the most important allergens, the main cause of sneezing at this time of year.
The most common way of treating this type of allergies is through antihistamines, drugs aimed at blocking the effects of histamine, a neurotransmitter that also plays an important role in immune system. Recall that allergies are nothing other than a reaction of our immune system to external substances that understands as dangerous and that are not really, allergens.
Antihistamines are very useful when treating allergic symptoms. But one thing is that, and another thing is to definitively cure these disorders. Today we do not have A cure for allergiesbut at least there are some routes open to hope. So close we are to achieve it.
Perhaps one of the first treatments that come to mind when talking about healing the allergy are vaccines. What we understand today as vaccines against allergy are immunotherapy -based injections, and its logic is not far from conventional vaccines: it is about administering a small amount of what causes us allergy capable of alerting the immune system without unleashing an allergic reaction. While they are a useful treatment in many cases, they do not finish solving the problem, so we will need periodic injections that will improve the response capacity of our immune system.
What ways are there open? Almost ten years ago, we commented on some of the open research lines in the search for a cure for allergies. These ways included, for example, the “biological therapies.” These are therapies that focus on antibodiesthe proteins that our body produces when it detects substances that it understands as harmful.
This type of treatments are still one of our great hopes. An example of this is omalizumab, a drug in principle aimed at combating asthma and approved two decades ago in the United States.
In recent years, science has been validating this therapeutua option. A recent example is in a study published in 2022 in the magazine Clinical and Translational Allergy. In this analysis, the team observed that the drug was effective when preventing spring allergic rhinitis.
Understand the problem
To understand how our knowledge has evolved in recent years, we must first understand why it is so difficult to find a definitive cure. The background problem is simple: We do not understand the allergies well enough to find a solution.
We still do not understand why certain people suffer from a certain allergy while others suffer from another type of reaction, at the same time that others do not seem to have such problems. Nor do we know why allergies are permanent despite the fact that the antibody that we generally associate with them does not usually remain in our body for long periods of time.
Two studies published last year in the magazine Science Translational Medicine They can help us understand this situation a little better, explaining at least this last point. The answer could be in an antibody that we generally do not associate with allergies, immunoglobulin G (IgG), and the cells that produce it.
What the teams responsible for these studies discovered is that some cells responsible for producing IgG produce immunoglobulin E, which is associated with allergies, when they run into an allergen. The key to allergic “memory” could therefore be in these cells.
Before going better, everything seems to indicate that the allergies problem will go worse. And is that every time More people suffer This type of disorders. There are several factors that could be, independently or together, behind rapid ascent in the number of allergic people in the world.
One of these hypotheses is that of hygiene. Since our immune system is “trains” through exposure to external agents, the absence of these agents in early stages can imply that our system does not perceive them as normal and, exposed in later stages, ends up reacting disproportionately.
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From the environmental point of view, we must also consider the presence of pollutants in the atmospherelike particular matter. These pollutants can also affect our airways, combining their effect with that of conventional allergens and aggravating the situation.
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