Two ways to survive an infection: what resistance and tolerance can teach us about treatments for infectious diseases

By Janelle S. Ayres, David S. Schneider. Nature reviews. Immunology, 2008

739 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A host can evolve two types of defence mechanism to increase its fitness when challenged with a pathogen: resistance and tolerance. Immunology is a well-defined field in which the mechanisms behind resistance to infection are dissected. By contrast, the mechanisms behind the ability to tolerate infections are studied in a less methodical manner. In this Opinion, we provide evidence that animals have specific tolerance mechanisms and discuss their potential clinical impact. It is important to distinguish between these two defence mechanisms because they have different pathological and epidemiological effects. An increased understanding of tolerance to pathogen infection could lead to more efficient treatments for infectious diseases and a better description of host–pathogen interactions.

Subfields: Genetics, Infectious Diseases, Parasitology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/83f56b49f6cb1acfd04575df4b7d4cf0d77e2bd5

How researchers see this paper

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In Genetics

1. N. Moran
2. Aviv Regev
3. J. Allen
4. Alvis Brazma
5. A. Shalek
6. Stephen R. Quake
7. Philipp Engel
8. Jason Rohr

In Infectious Diseases

1. Joachim L. Schultze
2. N. Moran
3. Philipp Engel

In Parasitology

1. J. Allen
2. Rick M. Maizels
3. R. Locksley
4. S. V. Van Dyken

Citations in the corpus

• The gut microbiota of insects - diversity in structure and function. (2013, background): “While tolerance is the ability to reduce negative impacts of a given bacterial load on the host’s health, resistance is the ability to reduce the bacterial load, so that it cannot impact the host’s health (Schneider & Ayres, 2008).”
• Ecological immunology and tolerance in plants and animals (2011, background): “…incidence and severity of malarial disease, despite having similar parasite burdens (Rogier, Commenges & Trape 1996; Wambua et al. 2006; Müller et al. 2009), and tolerancebased treatments are already in use for several diseases, including cholera and bacterial meningitis (Schneider & Ayres 2008).”
• Diversity and dialogue in immunity to helminths (2011, background): “Ecologists elegantly describe this balance between resistance and toleranc”
• Genomic responses in mouse models poorly mimic human inflammatory diseases (2013, neutral): “tolerance or resilience to infection (26, 27).”
• Developmental variation in resistance and tolerance in a multi‐host–parasite system (2010, background): “They can reduce parasite burden by avoiding or directly attacking parasites, or they can minimize the harm caused by a given parasite load (Read, Graham & Raberg 2008; Schneider & Ayres 2008; Raberg, Graham & Read 2009).”
• SARS-CoV-2 Receptor ACE2 Is an Interferon-Stimulated Gene in Human Airway Epithelial Cells and Is Detected in Specific Cell Subsets across Tissues (2020, positive): “More recently, disease tolerance to equivalent pathogen burden by factors that increase the ability of the host to tolerate tissue damage has been identified as part of a combined host defense strategy (Iwasaki et al., 2017; Iwasaki and Pillai, 2014; Medzhitov et al., 2012; Schneider and Ayres, 2008”