A study in mice offers a potential explanation for two longstanding questions about allergies: why do they often emerge only after repeated exposure, and why do people with one allergy frequently develop others?
The findings, published in the journal Immunity, could lead to future interventions.
Sensory neurons — the nerve cells that carry signals like itch and pain from the body's sensory receptors to the central nervous system — retain a "memory" of allergens that may help explain why allergies develop over time, researchers found.
The team had previously found that sensory neurons directly sense certain allergens and help start the allergic immune response. The new study shows that these neurons do not simply detect allergens in the moment but can retain a metabolically encoded record of previous exposures that allows them to respond more strongly to later exposures, even after the original allergen is gone.
“Neurons are known for their ability to form memories,” study leader Dr. Caroline Sokol of Mass General Brigham in Boston said in a statement.
“We asked whether an initial allergen exposure might leave a trace, not enough on its own to trigger a full allergic response, but enough to prime the neurons to respond more strongly the next time.”
Indeed, the researchers found that an initial exposure activates a specific signaling pathway in neurons that not only primes them to later respond to the same allergen, as the team hypothesized, but also to other allergens that share the same enzymatic activity but have different molecular structures, they reported.
This cross-allergen response may help explain why developing sensitivity to one allergen can increase susceptibility to others, they said.
“Now that we know what may cause people to become allergic and pick up more sensitivities, we can design ways to stop it from happening,” Sokol said.
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