[quote=The-Shoveler]Sometimes the more healthy you are the worse it can be.
The body attacks itself in response to the virus.
“cytokines attack”[/quote]
I don’t think that cytokine storms are a result of a particularly healthy immune system. They are partially defined by an immune system overreacting. But the overreaction isn’t because your immune system is healthy. The overreaction is something that some people have a genetic predisposition to.
One of the challenging clinical questions about the cytokine storm is why some individuals seem particularly susceptible yet others seem relatively resistant, and there has been a great deal of interest in identifying underlying genetic mechanisms (149). Recent studies have shown a vast amount of variability in the innate immune responses of healthy humans, as reflected by the intermediate phenotype of whole-blood cytokine responses to bacterial products (151). Hyper- and hyporesponders to bacterial products are identifiable in the healthy population, which is explainable in part by genetically determined differences in the structure and function of TLR receptors, particularly TLR1 (150). In a large population of septic patients, those with a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) marking a hyperfunctioning variant of TLR1 had increased organ dysfunction and morbidity from Gram-positive bacteremia (150). Other genetic polymorphisms also contribute to the severity of the host response in sepsis and the cytokine storm, but the TLR1 polymorphism has a particularly strong relationship to Gram-positive infections (149).
