Bacteria Helicobacter pylori protects against asthma

• April 26, 2024

In the last decades the allergy-induced asthma it has been taking virtually epidemic proportions in this industrialized world. The rapid increase in respiratory diseases is attributed to contamination, the hypothesis of hygiene and the excessive use of antibiotics.

In an interview for GetQoralHealth , Claudia Canales de Meza, mother of an asthmatic patient, gives us some recommendations to improve the quality of life of patients with this condition:

There are hypotheses that state that current hygiene measures have led people to have little exposure to infectious agents, which leads to a low level of development of the immune system .

In an article published in Journal of Clinical Investigation it was shown that this increase in asthma could be controlled with gastric bacteria Helicobacter pylori found in western populations.

H. pylori It is resistant to Gastric acid . It is estimated that around 50% of the world population is infected with this bacterium. This condition does not usually present symptoms and people live with it without any complications, only in special situations can it cause gastritis , gastric ulcers Y duodenals , or stomach cancer . Due to the high residence of this bacterium (which can naturally be found in the body) doctors abuse the use of antibiotics to kill the bacteria.

For the study, the researchers infected mice with the bacteria H. Pylori, It was discovered that if the mice were infected a few days after birth they developed a immunological tolerance to the bacteria and did not present any kind of reaction to the allergens to induce asthma. On the contrary, those mice that were not infected with the bacteria, when they reached their adult stage had a much weaker defense system and they developed asthma.

This is because early infection favors the maturation of dendritic cells and triggers the accumulation of T cells (necessary for the suppression of asthma). These results confirm the hygiene hypothesis: the increase in allergic asthma in industrialized countries is related to the high distribution of antibiotics and consequently to the disappearance of microorganisms that live permanently in the human body.

This study has great importance to understand what is causing the asthma and be able to develop preventive and therapeutic strategies for it.