A Hygiene HypothesisTheory about LADA [View all]

Someone asked me to repost this here. I am interested in the topic of HLA mediated autoimmune diseases being the result of the absence of parasitic infections to which our ancestors were routinely exposed. In the UK they are conducting trials using hookworm infections in patients with MS to see if the auto-antibodies can be distracted. The theory evolved because of observations that people who grew up in the old south rarely got MS while those who grow up in the new south are just as likely as those who grow up in the north to contract MS. In the old south, hookworm infections were common in childhood due to the habit of running around barefoot outdoors.

I recently speculated that Latent autoimmune diabetes of adults in which adults start out looking like Type 2 but eventually end up requiring insulin could also be an HLA mediated autoimmune condition brought on by the lack of a particular parasitic infection, because there are no cases of the disease in Papua, New Guinea but a fairly consistent rate of the disease in other countries. What if there is a parasite that is still common in New Guinea that has been eradicated in other countries? Here is the link to the original OP:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/114215052

I am beginning to suspect that the culprit might be trichinella, the round worms that you get from poorly cooked pork but also from bear meat, wild game and crocodiles. Trichinella is extremely common in Papua, New Guinea.

http://www.ajtmh.org/content/65/5/553.full.pdf

Here is some general info on trichinella

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/787591-overview

Obviously, infection would be more common if you hunt wild game, especially if you eat freshly caught wild game before it has been properly cooked, the way that the hunters in Papua, New Guinea do. This raises the possibility that when hunter-gatherer groups like Plains Native Americans were forced onto reservations and switched to a diet low in freshly hunted game, perhaps they were inadvertently deprived of trichinella infections--- good thing, right? Unless the lack of a trichinella infection triggered some of them to then go on to develop LADA or the diabetes that plagues Native Americans.

Not saying we should eat raw bacon. But, maybe there is way to create a derivative of the proteins of round worms to see if it could prevent this type of diabetes.

Oh, and here is an interesting link about how worm "excretory products" successfully treated colitis in rats. Lots of links within the article to other articles about the hygiene hypothesis.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4008629/