PLoS Pathogens reports that the study, which was done in mice, suggests that your immune system hijacks a hormone that controls your inclination to stop eating. This triggers your immune system to respond in the way it needs to be able to expel the worms from your gut, and researchers say that this discovery could lead to new ways to treat people with intestinal worms.
The study began out of a discovery that the researchers first made when they were measuring levels of a hormone called cholecystokinin in volunteers after they had been fed a meal. One participant had incredibly high levels of the hormone, and when the researchers investigated this further they discovered that he had an intestinal worm infection, which he had picked up on holiday. This led them to join forces with a team specialising in gut worm infections and do a study in mice infected with a worm called Trichinella spiralis.
The results were that the immune cells, called T-cells, responded to the worm infection by driving up levels of cholecystokinin, which had a knock-on effect of driving down another hunger hormone, leptin. Leptin influences what type of immune response the body needs to produce, and when the team artificially added it back into the infected mice, the immune system mounted the wrong response and the intestinal worms remained in the gut for longer.
According to study author Dr John Worthington, the researchers only examined one type of parasitic worm but are now doing tests to see if the same response was produced in response to other worms. He explained ‘Naturally you would think that if you are losing weight you are going to have less energy to fight off infection’ but in fact ‘This does the opposite of what you would expect.’ He concluded by saying that the team would eventually try to determine whether different treatment or nutrition strategies could be designed to boost this immune effect in people affected with intestinal worms.