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Complexities in the Relationship Between Infection and Autoimmunity

  • AUTOIMMUNITY (TK TARRANT, SECITON EDITOR)
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Abstract

The possible role of infections in driving autoimmune disease (AD) has long been debated. Many theories have emerged including release of hidden antigens, epitope spread, anti-idiotypes, molecular mimicry, the adjuvant effect, antigenic complementarity, or simply that AD could be a direct consequence of activation or subversion of the immune response by microbes. A number of issues are not adequately addressed by current theories, including why animal models of AD require adjuvants containing microbial peptides in addition to self tissue to induce disease, and why ADs occur more often in one sex than the other. Reviews published in the past 3 years have focused on the role of the innate immune response in driving AD and the possible role of persistent infections in altering immune responses. Overall, recent evidence suggests that microbes activating specific innate immune responses are critical, while antigenic cross-reactivity may perpetuate immune responses leading to chronic autoinflammatory disease.

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Acknowledgments

This article is funded in part by the National Institutes of Health (R01s HL087033 and HL111938) and the American Heart Association (12GRNT1205000) (to DeLisa Fairweather).

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Conflict of Interest

DeLisa Fairweather is a board member of the Myocarditis Foundation.

Robert Root-Bernstein declares that he has no conflict of interest.

Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent

This article does not contain any studies with animal subjects performed by any of the authors. With regard to the authors’ research cited in this paper, all procedures were followed in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 and 2008.

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  1. Department of Physiology, Michigan State University, 2174 Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    Robert Root-Bernstein

  2. Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 615 N. Wolfe Street, Room E7628, Baltimore, MD, 21205, USA

    DeLisa Fairweather

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  1. Robert Root-Bernstein
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Correspondence to DeLisa Fairweather.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Autoimmunity

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Root-Bernstein, R., Fairweather, D. Complexities in the Relationship Between Infection and Autoimmunity. Curr Allergy Asthma Rep 14, 407 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11882-013-0407-3

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