Your immune system produces hormones called cytokines. Two hundred cytokines have been identified so far.
Your hypothalamus directly affects your immune system through circadian hormones.
Your immune system’s job is to protect you.
White blood cells act like soldiers patrolling your tissues and protecting you from invasion. Your thymus produces hormones that program your white blood cells to know the difference between you and others. If they do not get programmed properly, your white blood cells attack you which is known as autoimmunity.
Whatever you’ve been exposed to in the past, like childhood chickenpox, your thymus remembers.
When you’re young, your T-cells remember the varicella virus which causes chicken pox to protect you from another outbreak. When you’re middle-aged, your T-cells can begin to forget the varicella virus, so exposure to a child with chicken pox can induce another varicella reaction called shingles. By the time women are postmenopausal and men are in their sixties, the thymus isn’t doing as good a job because it’s been shrinking over the years.
Your thymus is largest in early childhood as it actively receives hormonal messages called cytokines from the foraging white blood cells about the environment and then programs lymphocytes accordingly. Over the years, the thymus naturally shrinks until by the seventh or eighth decade it’s barely functioning which is why cancer is much more prevalent with age.
Your thymus depends on your hypothalamus to direct it through nocturnal hormones – particularly prolactin.
If your hypothalamus is dysfunctional, your immune system doesn’t protect you and in fact may attack you. That’s called autoimmunity.
Your hypothalamus is the maestro of your symphony of hormones and immune factors. Wisely supporting your hypothalamus helps keep all your Hormones in Harmony®. If you want to learn more, please join us in our Hormone Reboot Training.
0 Comments