Smoking ruins the immune system for a long time
Influence of environmental factors on the response of the immune system during the COVID-19 pandemic: a geneticist at a Dutch hospital
It would be valuable to learn more about how smoking influences immune cell function, and, in turn, what the body’s responses to infection and vaccination are, says Luo. “That could offer valuable insights into the broader health consequences of smoking.”
The health of your immune system is defined by how well it responds to things. Like Goldilocks, the Body prefers an immune response that is just enough to fight infections and inflammation, but not so much that the body starts to attack itself.
The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare how divergent immune responses can be, with some people becoming seriously ill after a SARS-CoV-2 infection, whereas others had no symptoms. Previous studies have highlighted the importance of sex, genetics and age in explaining part of this diversity in immune responses, but the role of other factors has not been defined fully.
The immune response was influenced by two factors: body mass index and whether someone had been exposed to the CMV. Smoking a cigarette has been shown to show an inflammatory response in the blood of smokers.
It is important because of the results about smoking and also because of the effort to track sources of variability in immune responses, says a geneticist at a Dutch hospital. The study found that different environmental factors can affect different things. “It makes me wonder how much detail we should consider when we are looking at targeted therapy or personalized medicine,” he says.
The data on cigarette consumption were particularly striking: the effect of smoking on cytokine responses was as large as the effects of age, sex and genetics. After giving up cigarettes, the effects lingered for a long time. Saint-André and her team found that these factors correlated with patterns of chemical tags, called methyl groups, that were added to the cells’ DNA in certain regions. There are methyl groups that can change the activity of genes.
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But the study still needs to be repeated to ensure that the results are generalizable, says Saint-André. In the future, it should include a group that is more diverse. The team has now expanded their study to include participants from Senegal and Hong Kong, she says. The researchers have also gone back to the original participants, and have collected fresh blood samples from 415 of them ten years after the original samples were taken.
A geneticist at a Dutch hospital has said that the effect of smoking on the immune system during the COVID-19 pandemic has been found to be as large as those of age, sex, genetics and sex. She said that the data on cigarette consumption were particularly striking, as the effect of smoking on cytokine responses was as large as the effects of sex and genetics.