r/todayilearned • u/lamest-liz • 11h ago
TIL that the genes that allowed people to survive the Black Death (ERAP2) now is suspected to cause autoimmune disease in modern humans such as Crohn’s Disease.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-black-death-shaped-human-evolution1.2k
u/Nfalck 10h ago
This makes a lot of sense. The immune system always needs to balance type 1 and type 2 errors. During a plague, you're more likely to survive if your immune system is more aggressive: fewer type 2 errors, but at the expense of more type 1 errors. Today, that calibration is quite harmful.
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u/ok123jump 7h ago
I’m thrilled my ancestors survived the Black Death just so my immune system could live on to fight its true nemesis: my own digestive tract.
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u/Muffin278 7h ago edited 5h ago
"The thyroid? Who even knows what that is, let's kill it"
- My immune system
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u/pichael289 6h ago
Mine did the same with my pancreas. Turns out you need that and your blood turns to fucking acid without it. Yeah that feels like it sounds. Unfortunately it's a very "profitable" disease so I can barely afford the good blood sugar sensors, every few months I can afford a script of them to keep shit straight but they don't last long and have gotten very hard to trick into reactivating at a lesser accurate rate. $500 a month is just too much each month... Fuck this country
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u/peakingoranges 6h ago
I’m always worried and trying to hoard pump supplies plus insulin in case I ever get laid off. Having T1D is so expensive.
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u/ChilledParadox 1h ago
after my last time being homeless I started literally rationing then stockpiling the saved extra insulin each month and can now comfortable say I'd be able to survive an extra two months if I suddenly lose the welfare that allows me to afford it since, well, I was fucking homeless two months ago.
it's expensive, stressful, makes everything else more stressful, and the only real downside is I'm constantly lethargic and exhausted and sometimes my body turns to acid and starts murdering itself.
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u/overkill 6h ago
I was going to make a joke about Aliens, but damn, the American healthcare system (or any for-profit healthcare system) is fucking you (and everyone not at the top of the pyramid) over. I'm so sorry that is how it's ended up.
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u/Commander_Zircon 3h ago
We really need an actual healthcare system, it’s so fucking unfair how unnecessarily unaffordable basic medical care is in the world’s “richest” country.
It was a big reason I moved away from the US just before I turned 26 and got kicked off my parents’ insurance. Now I pay 11€ for 2 vials of insulin and 0 for pump/cgm supplies
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u/Cats_4433 7h ago
Mine has been fighting real enemies like fruit, slightly imperfect air, and my own skin like they're the black death.
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u/kingk1teman 5h ago
slightly imperfect air
This is me. Low humidity? Let's start the allergic response. Very high humidity? Let's start the allergic response. Pollen or hay in the air? Let's. Very cold? Let's. Very hot? Let's.
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u/HuckleberryTiny5 5h ago
I've never had any food sensitivies. Comes Covid, which I must've gone through without symptoms. Now my body believes soy is the most harmful patogene ever patogened, and pea reminds soy so it must be dangerous too. Come to think of it, all legumes are suspicious and must be treated with aggression.
Been vegetarian for 15 years, for ethical reasons. I don't want to eat animals. I don't know what to do.
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u/Cats_4433 4h ago
I eat meat not because I like it, but because I'm allergic to too many fruits/veggies. A lot of people will do eggs from ethical, local farms or mollusks/insects if they need to eat animals but don't want to contribute to their suffering.
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u/BurmeciaWillSurvive 4h ago
You my latex-adjacent fruit allergy and psoriasis bro? Lol it all hit at 35 and I rapidly fell apart, all genetic from my parents
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u/Dr_Ukato 6h ago
Evolution sadly doesn't work intellegently or efficiently.
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u/Megneous 5h ago
Evolution is pretty good at causin' a lot of suffering. Don't have to be intelligent or efficient to do that.
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u/SimoneNonvelodico 6h ago
Unfortunately the best solution evolution found to disease is apparently a free roaming murderhobo D&D party made of several trillion barbarians.
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u/The_Grungeican 2h ago
maybe if people would take a little Black Death for it to fight, it would lay off the other stuff.
it's evolved to do a certain thing that it doesn't get to do anymore.
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u/FabiusBill 7h ago
Ulcerative Colitis or Crohn's?
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u/ok123jump 7h ago
Crohn’s. You?
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u/Queasy_Wasabi_5187 7h ago
Also crohn's. I just wish it was only interested in my digestive tract, but the fucker also wants to screw my eyes, joints, skin and pancreas.
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u/is-this-a-nick 6h ago
Gah, crohns here, and i hope it never hurts my eyes. Its already annoying to get part of your intestine cut out...
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u/pichael289 6h ago
Also aides. HIV was first cured using bone marrow transplants from a descendant that survived it.
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u/Soggy_Refrigerator32 4h ago
Yup. Joints? Mortal enemy. Tendons? Eww, who needs them. Skin? Fuck that. Covid has kicked off some nasty immune system shit in my relatives too.
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u/PrivilegeCheckmate 6h ago
Dude, I'm sitting over here, a light sleeper with an efficient digestion, 99th percentile height and a full set of wisdom teeth. In the modern era that translates to inability to get decent sleep in urban areas, easy weight gain /difficult weight loss, back problems up the wazoo and midlife dental surgery.
Creationists can go fuck themselves.
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u/Accomplished_Fly2720 6h ago
I mean your experience is consistent with a form of creationism where the the creator is a troll. It's kinda like those people who, during a video game character creation screen, go for the body horror route
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u/jordanfarragon 3h ago
Efficient digestion is a crazy way to justify poor eating habits
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u/Swamibo 11h ago
Reminds me of sickle cell anemia and malaria.
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u/Lying_virgin_ta 10h ago edited 9h ago
Also hemachromatosis, your body holds onto way too much iron but oddly enough keeps it out of certain immune cells. The result is that the plague couldnt reproduce while they were hitching a ride in those cells to your lymph nodes which reduced its lethality. But also you start getting iron poisoning in your 40s unless you regularly bleed yourself.
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u/keithps 9h ago
I'm a carrier for that gene. My aunt was a lucky one who won the recessive gene lottery. Out of 4 siblings she was the only one who got both genes, which tracks statistically. She didn't realize until she was in her 40s and starting having issues. Now she gives blood frequently.
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u/Fair_Angle_4752 7h ago
Also a carrier. As are both sisters. Father died from having 2 different genes, both recessive. They didn’t know what he had until it had destroyed his organs. So he died from an entirely treatable disease.
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u/doofgodly 6h ago
I’m so sorry, it was the exact same for my grandfather, nobody knew until it was too late 😥
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u/ol-gormsby 4h ago
That blood - if it's not excessively overloaded with iron and the various proteins that carry it, is very valuable for transfusion recipients.
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u/Serylt 1h ago
Indeed. I am only a carrier but my blood has such a high iron content that they gladly reinvite me for more donations each time.
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u/baethan 9h ago
metal
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u/allwaysnice 9h ago
Yes, specifically atomic number 26.
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u/Wakkit1988 9h ago
That's heavy.
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u/idrwierd 9h ago
Wild that blood letting may have some medical utility
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u/midgethemage 6h ago
Blood letting is also the only known way to reduce the amount of microplastics in your system!
Also, I'm pretty sure there's other uses for blood letting.
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u/MalodorousNutsack 6h ago
Microplastics have been found in semen as well. The best approach may be to jerk off until you're bleeding
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u/aliamokeee 9h ago
^ or drink alcohol in some hypotheses (I read an article on Irish alcoholism + high iron levels long ago, it may be bunk, just thought it could be)
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u/Marashio 8h ago
I have the disease and the first thing they asked me is if I was of irish heritage. Apparently the hemochromatosis is most prevalent in Irish.
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u/Marashio 8h ago
I have this. Apparently it’s mostly prevalent in people of Irish origin.
When I found out my iron saturation was 99%.
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u/Redplushie 8h ago
As someone who has a ferritin level of 900....
I'm in danger
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u/threelizards 6h ago
Yeah my grandad has it and it baffles me that the treatment is literally going to the hospital to bleed every few months. Victorian as hell.
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u/TinyPantherAdjacent 9h ago
Well yeah cause that’s how natural selection works. A Specific allele confers an advantage that helps that individual survive to maturity and reproduce, thus passing on that allele. All genetic traits work this way.
What’s additionally interesting in the case of sickle cell is that recessive traits like sickle cell often confer a significant NEGATIVE advantage (ie sickle cell disease) in individuals with two mutant copies of the allele, but these mutated alleles survive in the population because of a benefit they confer (specifically malaria protection in this case). By this theory, most recessive inheritance traits should also confer an advantage to the individual, but if they exist we don’t know them for many diseases.
This principle js also why we see sickle cell clustered in specific regions - a gene protecting against malaria is more beneficial…… in a region with malaria. Therefore the mutant allele present in sickle cell exists at a higher rate in areas with endemic malaria and in populations descended from people in those areas.
I love genetics it’s so cool!
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u/hiimsubclavian 4h ago
Yeah people see evolution as evolving into a perfect body or higher plane of existence or some shit.
Most of the time it's just our genetics flipping back and forth between two opposing environmental pressures.
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u/celestialbrains 11h ago
I’m a carrier for the hemochromatosis gene, that’s another one that helped people survive the plague.
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u/DiFraggiPrutto 10h ago
According to a comment above, people with hematochromasis regularly need to “bleed themselves”. Do you need to do something like that?
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u/celestialbrains 10h ago
I’m only a carrier and I menstruate. I’ve heard it’s much worse for men for that reason.
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u/fizzyanklet 9h ago
My father in law had to give blood every few weeks to keep his iron levels down. He eventually did develop cirrhosis.
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u/KvellOnWheels 9h ago edited 5h ago
I did not know this and my mind is blown. Off to read about menstruation helping mitigate the effects of hemochromatosis.
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u/Lying_virgin_ta 9h ago
I googled it after because I was basing this off a book (survival of the sickest) I read 15 years ago, but therapeutic phlebotomy is still the preferred treatment. I was pretty far off about how lethal it is tho. Turns out its extremely variable and the case I read about is someone who had a pretty severe case.
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u/drpepper7557 7h ago edited 6h ago
So Im a carrier as well. From what I understand, the vast majority have no symptoms. Very rarely some do, but its believed to be usually caused by secretly being a compound carrier.
Basically there are actually a few mutations that can cause it, and probably some rare or fluke ones not well studied. You might be only a carrier for one common mutation, but while undetected, you also carry one of the other ones. Apparently this can rarely cause the disease too.
Personally, my doctor said the only meaningful risk for 99% of carriers is having children. Carriers have to have their partners screened, because if theyre a carrier too, the children can have full hemochromatosis. If you or your partner are Northern European ethnically, especially Irish or Scottish, its up to like a 1 in 50 chance to be a carrier (edit: I googled it and it actually might be higher). Other than that, for most carriers, its just a fun fact about them.
And to clarify, a carrier just has one copy of the gene. Someone with 2 copies will usually have to do regular phlebotomies or they risk a host of health issues. They check your iron levels though and you only have to do it if theyre consistently abnormal.
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u/Marashio 7h ago
I have it. The first year I found out I was giving a pint of blood once a month/once every other month. It’s been a few years now and having changed up my diet to avoid high iron foods and drinking less alcohol has helped a lot. Last time I had to bloodlet was about a year ago.
I check my levels every 6 months now.
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u/PracticalPin5623 10h ago
Carrier Twinsies!
I'm also a carrier for PKU: which is how my ancestors survived their mother's having to eat moldy-ass root vegetables during famines. DNA is f'in wild.
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u/lamest-liz 11h ago
I have Crohn’s Disease as well as multiple other chronic illnesses. Reading about this is very interesting to me and somewhat shocking. Here is a video about it as well.
According to my dna markers I am 20% indigenous American and 80% mixed European heritage. It’s worthy to note that this study was conducted on mostly European corpse studies.
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u/tombrady011235 11h ago
So you’re immune to the plague?
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u/Rodnal 10h ago
I remember reading an article that stated the survivors of the plague walked away with a mutated gene that did just that but it opened the door to a ton of autoimmune diseases in the generations that followed.
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u/Magusreaver 10h ago
so.. the above article?
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u/Rodnal 10h ago
Yep, pretty much but I don’t remember it being this exact article and it went into more depth regarding autoimmunities. Guess I should’ve clarified that.
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u/b0w3n 8h ago
I wonder if you're remembering the articles on CCR5 mutations. CCR5-delta32 is similar to this one, it imparts some level immunity to HIV and is related to the pressure from the bubonic plague (and smallpox) too.
People with this mutation seem to have better bone density, but also makes them very susceptible with things like tick or mosquito borne diseases.
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u/Lanster27 8h ago
He is remembering something he just read.
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u/LordoftheScheisse 8h ago
That reminds me of something I once read, it said "He is remembering something he just read." Wild stuff.
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u/CharlotteLucasOP 9h ago
You can still have the plague and get really sick but not quite die from it.
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u/Curiosive 8h ago
In the 90s when we knew very little about HIV/AIDS, there were some people repeatedly exposed to the virus that never contracted it. A study linked these individuals to having a distant relative on both side of their family tree to have survived the Black Plague.
I don't know if that held up against further review. I don't know if this will either.
I am sorry you have a buffet of chronic illnesses. I hope you can maintain a semblance of normalcy most days!
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u/Dark_Shade_75 10h ago
I also have it. Doubt it's related, but I also never caught Covid even though I was out and about a lot.
My family heritage is mostly european as well.
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u/bg-j38 6h ago
I've wondered about this actually. My girlfriend has pretty severe Crohn's, to the point where she had to have nearly her entire colon removed and is on strong drugs to suppress her immune system. If she gets a cold it will last two or three times longer than me. Yet one time when I had Covid and didn't realize it yet, we spent a day together in close contact. Once I tested positive I self quarantined and we were terrified she'd get it, but she never showed any symptoms and tested negative multiple times. Could have just been luck of the draw but I do wonder if she may have some sort of immunity and if it's related.
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u/Muffin278 7h ago
Same! I am European, have several auto-immune disorders and never caught Covid and have (as far as I know) never gotten the flu.
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u/Randyaccredit 10h ago
Don't get it and if you do you will probably get your taste back, if you do lose your taste Fairlife Milk sometimes and mainly Promised Land Midnight Chocolate helped me get through it to be able to taste again. I literally cried.
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u/SpiralingDownAndAway 8h ago
Briefly losing my sense of taste when I had Covid was the most disorienting thing I ever experienced. I tried eating a chicken bacon and ranch pizza but when I bit down it was nothing but odd texture and my brain struggling to remember what had which flavor and taste. Even soda was Wrong it was just like fizzy water, and even then no taste. It sucked.
I’m glad it faded eventually but I feel for those who never regained it and those who weren’t able to fight it and got the variety of long covid health issues or worse ):
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u/MegaGrimer 8h ago
I also temporarily lost most of my taste the first time I caught Covid. I could taste bacon, but only very barely. It was so faint I half considered that my brain was playing tricks on me.
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u/SummertimeThrowaway2 10h ago
I wish I lost my taste because I think I had the worst pizza in london when I was sick with covid.
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u/TallDarkFountain 9h ago
if you lost your taste you'd be begging to taste that shitty pizza again
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u/Whiteelefant 10h ago
Do you have any Ashkenazi by chance? I only know two people with Crohn's disease and they're both Ashkenazi.
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u/KvellOnWheels 9h ago
This made me laugh out loud.
Am Ashkenazi and Sephardi.
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u/lamest-liz 9h ago
I don’t think so, here is it written out:
20% indigenous American (Ojibwe), 39% Celtic/Gaelic, 26% England, 4% Netherlands, 3% German, 2% Iceland, 4% Greece, 1% Romanian, 1% Balkans
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u/stoneangelchoir 11h ago
Ah, nothing like delayed trauma… for generations and generations.
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u/thebruce 11h ago
It's gonna be frustrating when we start engineering cosmetic changes into genes that turn out to give those peoples descendents ultra susceptibility to space malaria.
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u/Bluechariot 10h ago
Fuckin' hell dude, that implies there's space mosquitos.
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u/hugeyakmen 10h ago
The space malaria really isn't something that kills many, but that's only because they usually don't survive the puncture wound from those 6ft space mosquitoes
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u/ImpossibleEbb6862 10h ago
Well if they wanted people to take it seriously they shouldn’t have given it such a silly name.
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u/BlockHeadJones 9h ago
Look what the American civil war bought us... Ending slavery, yes. But also the losers of the war isolated themselves and continued to be racist assholes
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u/Due-Hippo-3853 10h ago edited 10h ago
Yeah I have an autoimmune disease and I rarely get actually sick, I always assumed it was cause my overactive immune system is too inhabitable for normal viruses. Sounds great except for the fact that I feel like I'm constantly at fever body temp, my insides are slowly being destroyed, and I have to inject medication to keep my skin from covering itself in red plaques woo!
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u/slusho55 10h ago
Kinda makes sense. A hyperactive immune system would probably be more resilient to some pathogens.
Also, lovely to see how Chron’s Disease survived natural selection. Considering how many people died globally, almost makes me wonder if Crohn’s was almost non-existent genetically prior to the plague
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u/totally_not_a_dog113 9h ago
Crohn's pops up later on too though. I had an ex who didn't run into problems until he was in his mid 30s. Historically, a lot of people had babies before then.
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u/tekanet 7h ago
Peek of diagnosis (40 percent) for Crohn’s is between 15 and 35, with 20 percent in teens and before. Often times Crohn’s get wrongly diagnosed as IBS because of the overlapping symptoms, that moves the correct diagnosis later on; so it might be labeled later, but it pops up quite earlier.
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u/the_nin_collector 4h ago
Its not just Crohn's, its IBD which includes UC as well. They usually don't develop until your 20s. Sometimes late teens. Mine didn't develop until I was 35. UC would be 100% fatal in about 50% of cases or more just 75 years ago. But that's more than enough time to reproduce. The average age of a woman having their first child was around 20 100 years ago.
My UC is so bad I would have died in the first year, probably, if it were still 1900. If I had survived the very rare and very new colerectomy procedure, I would have lived a miserable life. I am so grateful for the state-of-the-art meds we have today. I still have my colon.
(I just googled it, in the 1920s, UC had a fatality rate of 30 to 60%, far higher than chrons)
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u/Shadowrend01 10h ago edited 49m ago
Medical intervention has reduced the effectiveness of natural selection
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u/bzbub2 10h ago
the article posted here covers a 2022 paper "Evolution of immune genes is associated with the Black Death" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36261521/ but note that there is a rebuttal to this paper from 2023 "Insufficient evidence for natural selection associated with the Black Death" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11938207/ the original authors responded again with https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37066254/ but it is a cautious signal
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u/xubax 9h ago
Survival of the sickest is a book that covers this sort of thing.
Diseases that help you live long enough to procreate, but eventually kill you.
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u/Lost-Philosophy6689 9h ago
Vestigial genes and the effects of modern society cause so many of our medical and mental health problems these days
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u/ContinuumGuy 9h ago
Something of note: Even for the era, the time of the Black Death had massive amounts of anti-semitic violence, as many believed the Jews were at fault since they didn't seem to die of the plague as much.
Modern Ashkenazi Jews have a higher rate of Crohn's disease than the general population.
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u/shaft_of_lite 9h ago
Your ancestors survived the plague so you could shit your pants. Congratulations.
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u/PrincessJoyHope 8h ago
Maybe try giving them a live black death vaccine so their immune system can get a taste of what it’s intended for
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u/Dracekidjr 8h ago
Imagine the cure to shitting and vomiting yourself to death is just shitting yourself to death before the vomiting can get to you
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u/Witty-Ad5743 11h ago
Well.... that backfired.
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u/Ehloanna 8h ago
As someone with Crohn's this is very annoying. Like damn y'all survived so now I gotta go through hell aka my body trying to destroy itself? Thanks. 🥲
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u/Infamous-Use7820 4h ago
Bit of a linguistic nitpick. But everyone has ERAP2. Human genes themselves don't tend to vary between individuals. Very rarely on evolutionary timescales you get duplications and deletions, but in-general whenever you see a headline like this what's being referred to is an allele (variant) of a gene.
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u/FadedVictor 3h ago
There's a theory as well that a lot of auto immune disorders are a result of a lack of parasites. Many humans in the prehistoric days were riddled with parasites. Our immune systems adjusted to their presence and responded accordingly. Now that a lot of humans are parasite free, our immune system overreacts as if they were still there.
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u/soljakid 2h ago
Diagnosed with ulcerative colitis at 19 felt like the biggest "fuck you" from life, went from being really in shape and active to practically housebound in the space of a few years, doing a lot better now i've figured out what helps, but the first few years were a nightmare.
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u/PleaseJustLetsNot 10h ago
If I remember correctly, it also offers a level of immunity to HIV and Aids.
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u/scottishdrunkard 25 5h ago
This just plays further into shutting up the anti-vaxxers who say "I don't need vaccines, I have an immune system". Peasants had an immune system, three quarters of them died, and the ones that didn't die, gave us Crohns.
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u/Blue_Eyed_ME 4h ago
I have a rare auto inflammatory disease that's triggered by the innate immune system (and then complicated by the adaptive immune system). My rheumatologist told me about this black death/genetic selection ages ago, and I left my dna at the NIH so it could be studied.
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u/existentiallyfaded 3h ago
Kind of like cystic fibrosis carriers being less susceptible to tuberculosis and typhoid fever
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u/heathers1 2h ago
Is this the same gene that helped people avoid getting aids? I watched the doc “the gene” on netflix, SO interesting!!!
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u/_B1RDM4N 7h ago
Damn so those that escaped the plague and their ancestors have been living on borrowed time? Death doesn’t forget. A dark poem.
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u/SteroidSandwich 7h ago
Aren't I lucky... I get heavy immune suppressants for something that's no longer a threat
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u/pichael289 6h ago
Doesn't it also grant some immunity to HIV? The first person cured used bone marrow transplants of a descendant of a survivor.
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u/SpookySkeleTOM 11h ago edited 7h ago
Inside you are two wolves. One is your immune system, the other is constituted of the diseases you're exposed to, and when they are not fighting each other they destroy random furniture in your house (your body).