Burning Down the House..try burning the idea!

Epitope spread was a concept generated to suggest how a response to a pathogen could turn into autoimmunity through the liberation of autoantigens following attack by a pathogen. 

Next it was the reason for relapse.

Next it was sequential..Now it is the next avenue to therapy. 

Good Idea taken abit to too much of an extreme

You can get your blinkered ideas here or elsewhere, 
Some of you prefer to go elsewhere for your enlightenment


Imagine a house on fire that starts in the kitchen". “The kitchen burns down and the fire spreads to the living room and then spreads to the next room. By the time the fire is in the third room, the fire in the kitchen is out because there’s nothing left to burn and only smoldering embers can be detected there. In epitope spreading, inflammation spreads like a fire until every epitope that can elicit a response occurs in a sequential and often predictable cascade, and the whole house burns down.”


The problem is that besides a few fire starters, no-one else on the planet can show it to occur in a sequential fashion and in the majority of studies the original responses persists, so your fire starts in the kitchen and stays in the kitchen whilst the rest of the house burns down sometimes it goes through the roof sometimes via a door! Obviously the water closet was spared so we can still get the fertiliser.


Relapses occur in T cell receptor transgenics so it is hardly likely due to be due to spread to another specificity

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