Jonathan Edwards
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Something I have been wondering about is whether susceptibility might cluster around a regulatory shift that works a bit like a software update.
We are very used to the idea that in other types of animals complete software rewrites are obvious. The classic ones are insects undergoing metamorphosis as pupae, re-writing the caterpillar as a butterfly and tadpoles being re-written as frogs.
We know that the immune system undergoes shifts in things like thymic education of T cells but that isn't really a re-write and the timing doesn't seem to fit. Puberty is a sort of software re-write and so is menopause but again, as already mentioned, these do not seem to fit too well with the apparent peaks. People talk of male menopause but it isn't that obvious.
That leaves the possibility that there might be hypothalamic re-writes that we haven't thought of at all but that might make sense. The transition from responding to environment as a child to responding as an adult is quite big. Another shift in mid thirties might seem implausible but from an evolutionary point of view might not be totally unexpected. People's sleep patterns can change quite markedly in mid life, for instance.
Maybe the immune system itself does not change at these time points but the software for neural responses to immune signals that drives epigenetic changes over days, weeks or months undergoes shifts?
We are very used to the idea that in other types of animals complete software rewrites are obvious. The classic ones are insects undergoing metamorphosis as pupae, re-writing the caterpillar as a butterfly and tadpoles being re-written as frogs.
We know that the immune system undergoes shifts in things like thymic education of T cells but that isn't really a re-write and the timing doesn't seem to fit. Puberty is a sort of software re-write and so is menopause but again, as already mentioned, these do not seem to fit too well with the apparent peaks. People talk of male menopause but it isn't that obvious.
That leaves the possibility that there might be hypothalamic re-writes that we haven't thought of at all but that might make sense. The transition from responding to environment as a child to responding as an adult is quite big. Another shift in mid thirties might seem implausible but from an evolutionary point of view might not be totally unexpected. People's sleep patterns can change quite markedly in mid life, for instance.
Maybe the immune system itself does not change at these time points but the software for neural responses to immune signals that drives epigenetic changes over days, weeks or months undergoes shifts?
