Your Immune System: Things That Can Weaken It

What’s more, a short period of binge drinking — let’s say a month — can cause a reduction in T cells. And this reduction is equal to that of someone who has been binge drinking for 6 months. If you’re unfamiliar, inflammation is what naturally occurs when your immune system goes into action. The redness and swelling that you see is the result of your body sending more blood to provide nutrients to the site of injury.

When they become activated, CD4+ cells secrete various cytokines to facilitate different types of immune responses. For example, type 1 CD4+ cells are characterized by the secretion of interferon γ (IFN-γ); they act primarily against pathogens that are found within cells. Activated T cells normally undergo apoptosis if they receive a second activation stimulus within a short interval.

Short-term effects of alcohol on the immune system

Upon LPS binding, monocytes become activated, mature into macrophages and migrate into tissues where they respond to infection by secreting various cytokines, recruiting additional leukocytes via production of chemokines and presenting pathogen-derived peptides to T cells to activate them. Often, investigators stimulate with LPS after pre-exposure to ethanol to mimic inflammation observed in trauma patients with high blood alcohol levels and explore the alterations in immunity that lead to frequent subsequent infections among this group. The effects of chronic alcohol exposure are not limited to phenotypic changes in T cells but also include T-cell functions. Among other reactions, LPS injection normally triggers lymphocyte migration out of the circulation and into tissues and the lymphatic system (Percival and Sims 2000). In water- or wine-consuming mice, LPS injection, as expected, led to a 50 percent reduction in the number of lymphocytes in the peripheral blood, indicating their mobilization into tissues.

Prolonged alcohol consumption impairs the cells’ phagocytic capacity (Joshi et al. 2005, 2009), release of cytokines and chemokines (D’Souza et al. 1996), and release of neutrophil chemoattractants (Craig et al. 2009). Although alveolar macrophages are the primary residential innate immune cells and play a pivotal role in the clearance of bacterial and viral pathogens, understanding of and research on their specific function in the context of heavy alcohol does alcohol weaken your immune system consumption and AUD still is lacking. It is clear, however, that prolonged alcohol consumption alters the pathophysiology and key factors involved in neutrophil-driven lung immunity in response to S. The following paragraphs outline the data supporting these deleterious effects of heavy alcohol consumption on neutrophil function in the context of S. This increased susceptibility has been recapitulated in rodent models of chronic alcohol abuse.

Blood Alcohol Concentration: What to Know About Alcohol Levels

Plant-based foods also fill you up with fiber, which helps lower your body fat percentage, which can strengthen your immune response. Ethanol consumption by weanling ICR (outbred) mice (adjusted to 6% in their drinking water) for 8 weeks also resulted in 75% fewer CD3+ T cells (Percival and Sims 2000). Likewise, male rats fed an ethanol-containing liquid diet (8.7% v/v for up to 4 weeks) experienced a progressive loss of both CD4+ and CD8+ T cells (Boyadjieva, Dokur et al. 2002). Increased apoptosis of T and B lymphocytes isolated from the thymus, spleen, and lymph nodes of female mice was observed following 16 hour culture with 0.4%-2% ethanol, concentrations 5 to 25 times the definition of intoxication (Slukvin and Jerrells 1995).