AHS16 - Ancestral Health Symposium 2016

The immune endocrine axis plays an important role in shaping the systemic immune response to injury, trauma and infection. Under homeostatic conditions the endocrine system is regulated by a network of feedback loops. However, following infection or injury, these homeostatic controls may not produce the ideal conditions for a proper response to the challenge. The need to regulate the endocrine system to adapt to trauma is mediated by the immune system through the immune endocrine axis which includes autoreactive B and T cells. These autoreactive immune cells have the ability to stimulate and suppress hormone production both through direct action as well as through changes in receptor expression. Prolonged or inappropriate activation of these pathways due, most likely, to altered microbiome can lead to chronic activation or suppression of related hormone production. This change in activation would then lead to increased or decreased volume or the corresponding gland dependent on activation state where overproduction leads to increased volume and suppression would lead to atrophy. This alteration in activation of the immune endocrine axis is both necessary and sufficient to explain the pathology of AED.