Immune system and symptoms are inversely related right

cppoly said...
Isn't it true the healthier someone's immune system is, the less symptoms they will have from lyme and co-infections? Likewise, a weaker immune system would mean more symptoms...

I'm having a hard time understanding this concept because blood work indicates a weakened immune system since I have elevated C3A levels but I really only have one primary symptom from lyme and babesia, just insomnia. Wouldn't that correlate with a strong immune symptom? Or since insomnia is such a devastating symptom, it counts several times of the less severe symptoms?

Not necessarily. A big contributor to more symptoms is length of time you have symptoms before treating.

I started with a handful - but didn’t treat until 1 1/2 years later - when I had over 30.

Our immune system is extremely complex and I would say not even being close to fully understood. Like Astro said, there are many parts to our immune system but it is classified into two subsystems, the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system. There is some good reading on each.

To answer your question about immune response depends on the patient. The initial reaction to acquiring the borrelia bacteria that causes Lyme is quite different than the reaction from someone who has had borrelia for many years. A correlation between our immune system and baking a cake can be made. Baking one cake is easy and not a problem, but what happens when you bake a cake every day?.......You eventually run out of ingredients. Lets say you run out of eggs, you can still bake a cake without eggs but it won't taste good. That is what happens to our immune response over time, we start running out of ingredients to make our immune system function efficiently. And then the next day, you run out of butter. Now the cake is not tasting like you want it to taste or our immune function isn't doing what it once was. All of a sudden, you get a few eggs and butter and the cake tastes good again. You do this with our immune system and because of our down regulated detox pathways, we struggle. An immune system equivalent to cake and eggs could be substrates used to increase methylation.

If insomnia is your only issue, you should focus on that. If you want to go down that road, I'll ask the standard questions I ask for people that have insomnia and see if we can get going in the right direction. Insomnia has so many potential causes, you basically have to eliminate what is not causing it.

No, not always. Everyone is impacted in different ways. The infection load and the types of infections whether bacterial, viral; protozoas like babesia all play a role in immunity as well as the length of time of an infection(s). In general, many people are asymptomatic to Borrelia Burgdorferi. Being Asymptomatic to borrelia can lead to a greater chance of a chronic, desseminated infection. Lyme likes to manipulate your immune system into releasing il10 cytokines and other antiinflammatory immune markers, which can lack an acute immune response. So, in many cases a strong acute inflammatory immune response with high fever temperatures is your body trying to clear out the infection, which is good. So, a hyperactive immune response, although it can be attributed to autoimmunity, though you’d have to test for anti nuclear antibodies, many times is a necessary immune response to an infection whether acute or chronic/persistent. For instance there’s a specific protein I think called SoCs3 and some cytokines that when decreased in vico rid of Lyme symptoms, HOWEVER, this leads to a greater infection load and a more desseminated infection. Symptoms many times come from an immune response, especially joint, muscle and bone pain. Then again, neurological symptoms like encephalopathy can be attributed to inflammatory cytokines due to an increased infection load in the blood, usually which has passed the blood brain barrier. Then you have anergy; the inability with long term persistent infections for your immune system to recognize and make antibodies against the lipids on borrelia (immunocprpmosed). Natural killer cells are also thwarted which in this state can lead to cancer later on in life. Plus, a strong immune reaponse to a desseminated infection can sometimes cause post-sepsis and immunosupression but so couldn’t a long term inflammatory reponse. Your body trys to create or have some sort of equillibrium, for instance, the disease: acute antinmda encephalitis can many times be due to a neurological infection and your immune response to that infection. For instance, you need nmda receptors to have a memory, to have executive funtions, etc., what Lyme does so well is that it causes your immune system to release a neurotoxic chemical called Quinolinic acid. This causes what we know as brain lesions, especially on the hippcampus. Microglia and macrophages release this in order to try to kill the infection residing in the brain. QUIN unfortunately is an nmda receptor agonist. A strong one at that, leaving calcium in the synapse long enough to cause cell death. All neuroborreliosis patients have elevated QUIN in the brain.

So, your body TRIES to create an equillibrium. However, Lyme also has Ammonia and glutamate as a byproduct both also neurotoxic and NMDA receptor agonists!! You need antagonists (modulators) too like magnesium to combat overfiring of nmda receptors from these agonists. So, in this state of overfiring your immune system can create nmda antibodies that destroy these important receptors thus causing psycotic episodes and lose of reality. Not always of course but it can happen. If you’ve ever tried ketamine, which you shouldn’t, its a potent nmda antagonist and used for Lyme in studies right now to combat QUIN and nmda receptor overfiring. It also causes the same symptoms in high dosages of what it would feel sort of like if your nmda receptors were destroyed by your immune system without the negative side effects by antagonizing them; Hallucinations and loss of reality. In the future small dosages of ketamine might be able to combat the symptoms of neuroborreliosis.

In conclusion, you can get symptoms from having a low immunesystem, compromised immunesystem, competent, stable immunesystem to an elevated immune system which in the long run can sometimes cause autoimmunity and even post-sepsis syndrome. Equillibrium is very important.

I’d say the sickest people are those that have incompetent, compromised immune systems with long term desseminated infections. Your infection load would be tremendous and would likely kill you slowly if you decided not to atleast fix your immunity or kill the bugs. Killing isn’t enough in this stage though, you need to have a healthy immune-system that can fight in your favor without causinf cytokine storms that could potentially kill you.