Immunodeficiency and the Autoimmunity - Essay Example

"Immunodeficiency and the Autoimmunity" is a wonderful example of a paper on the immune system. Diabetes is a disease that causes an individual to become immunocompromised. It is one of the disorders of metabolism (Grammatikos & Tsokos, 2012). It affects the production of insulin which often helps in digesting glucose. The three major types of diabetes are gestational diabetes, type 1diabetes, and type 2diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is one of the autoimmune diseases that result whenever the immune system turns against a certain part of the body. In this case, the immune system often attacks and destroys the beta cells responsible for the production of insulin in the pancreas. This, thus, makes the pancreas produce either little or no insulin. In the case of type 2 diabetes, the body usually produces enough insulin however the body is unable to effectively make use of it, creating a condition called insulin resistance. This makes insulin production decrease resulting in the same case similar to type 1diabetes. Gestation diabetes, on the other hand, often comes about due to pregnancy hormones or a shortage of insulin (Grammatikos & Tsokos, 2012).

Generally, diabetes is a lifestyle disease. This implies that managing diabetes has to involve keeping the level of blood glucose under control. Moreover, one needs to make sure he/she manages cholesterol levels, as well as blood pressure. This is achieved through practicing healthy eating, the use of medication, and physical activities.  The affected person can also make use of aspirin therapy and the use of smoking cessation to help lower the risk (Grammatikos & Tsokos, 2012).

Other immunodeficiency diseases include certain types of cancers. Leukemia disease is one such example. Leukemia is a cancer disease that affects the bone marrow or the blood (Colvin & Elfenbein, 2003). It is often characterized by the abnormal increase of blasts or immature white blood cells. In essence, Leukemia alters the normal functioning of the lymphocytes. This renders them unable to mount the immune response. In certain cases, the B lymphocytes are not able to mature into the immunoglobulin-producing plasma cell (Colvin & Elfenbein, 2003). Additionally, since white blood cells responsible for fighting the pathogens might be suppressed or become dysfunctional, the immune system of the patient may fail to fight off some simple infections and start attacking other body cells. Since Leukemia is known for preventing the immune system from functioning properly, the affected patients become prone to frequent infections that range from infected mouth sores, tonsils, pneumonia, and other life-threatening diseases. Leukemia disease greatly affects an individual’s lifestyle.  Since most leukemia forms are often treated using a pharmaceutical medication, which includes a chemotherapy regimen, transplant, the person affected by leukemia is bound to more often than not undergo chemotherapy, as well as radiotherapy. This implies that the affected individual survives on medication and focuses on controlling the bone marrow and the systemic entire body disease and the treatment is cantered on preventing leukemia cells from spreading to the entire body (Colvin & Elfenbein, 2003).

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