Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive

by Philipp Dettmer

Mast Cells have receptors that connect and attach to the butt regions of IgE Antibodies. So if IgE is produced after your first exposure to an allergen, Mast Cells swoop them up like a large magnet would swoop up a bunch of nails. So you can imagine a “charged and armed” Mast Cell as a big magnet, covered with thousands of tiny spikes. When allergens pass by, the IgE Antibodies on the Mast Cell can extremely easily connect to them. To make matters worse, IgE on Mast Cells is stable for weeks or even months—the connection protects them from decay. So, after your initial exposure to an allergen, you have these bombs in your skin, your lungs, or your gut, ready to get activated very quickly. Time passes and nothing happens, until you finally eat a bunch of crabmeat again and flood your system with the allergen enabling the Mast Cells covered in IgE to connect to it. Now the armed allergy bomb goes off inside your body. Your armed Mast Cells undergo degranulation, which is a nice way of saying that they vomit out all of their chemicals that are inflammatory superchargers, especially histamine. This causes virtually all of the very unpleasant things that you experience during an allergic reaction: It tells the blood vessels to contract and let fluid stream into the tissue, causing redness, heat and swelling, itching, and a general feeling of unwellness.