*According to a new report, African Americans have a greater immune response to infection than white Americans of European descent.
This study, completed by both U.S. and Canadian researchers, was led by Luis Barreiro, assistant professor at the University of Montreal’s Department of Pediatrics. In his study, Barreiro drew white blood cells from 175 Americans, 80 of whom were of African descent.
The researchers then infected those white blood cells with harmful bacteria like listeria and salmonella in order to monitor their response. Within just 24 hours, the white blood cells taken from black Americans successfully killed off the infection, which was an incredible three times faster than the immune response of white Americans.
While these findings may lead to treatments that reduce chronic health risks for this demographic, the improved immune response also carries negative side effects, including African Americans’ higher risk for both heart disease and stroke.
How are the two issues related? When a body’s immune system finds an infection, it uses inflammation as a response in order to kill the infecting cells. However, too much inflammation can cause chronic high blood pressure, damage the heart, and increase susceptibility for autoimmune diseases such as Crohn’s disease and lupus.
And when someone suffers from heart disease, they are more prone to a variety of other dangerous health problems. For instance, when a sleep apnea sufferer also has heart disease, sleep apnea episodes can lower oxygen levels in the blood and lead to sudden death due to an irregular heartbeat. Not only that, but untreated sleep apnea sufferers are three times as likely to have heart disease, too.
Barreiro believes that these genetic differences are due to both evolution and natural selection. Researchers believe that introducing Neanderthal variations into the European genome decreases the pro-inflammatory immune responses to bacterial and viral infections. According to the scientific research, once Europe was colonized by this new group of people, the genes evolved.
The immune system of Africans was not able to evolve because the Neanderthals were unable to colonize the continent before their extinction 40,000 years ago.
However, these findings will guide the way for researchers to develop treatments for chronic diseases.
“The genes and pathways we’ve identified constitute good candidates to explain differences we are seeing in disease between the two population groups,” Barreiro concluded to UPI. “Now that we have these genetic variants, we can test if these variants are associated with differences in susceptibility to diseases.”
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