medical professionals on allergies

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I stumbled upon an interesting article about how the human body responds during an allergic reaction. The title is "Allergies as an epithelial barrier disease" by Pirkko Mattila, Sakari Joenvaara, Jutta Renkonen, Sanna Toppila-Salmi, and Risto Renkonen. It is published in Clinical and Translational Allergy 1:5 (doi:10.1186/2045-7022-1-5).

Since I've got so many allergies, this piece is interesting to me. Here's the link to the article:

The authors review the literature that looked at allergies as epithelial diseases. This means that the barrier between the person and the environment (the skin or the lining of the lungs, for example) is breached, allowing foreign objects to enter the body, leading to the allergic reaction. The breaches in these barriers may be caused by mutations in the receptors on the epithelials that turn them off (imagine cell sites being turned off and mobile phones unable to detect network signals because the cell sites aren't working).

This is quite a different view from what I've learned in school: that an allergic reaction is hyperactive reaction of the immune system. 

Please have a read of the paper. I hope you'll find it as interesting as I did. Enjoy!

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