Summary: Adjuvants are agents added to vaccines to heighten the immune system response to the primary antigen. The video below presents an excellent lecture by one of the world’s leading experts in autoimmunology. He explains how adjuvants can trigger autoimmune reactions that manifest, months or years later, as autoimmune diseases. His exposition, richly illustrated by published case studies, is valuable for all clinicians regardless of specialty. Practically any tissue in the body, including the brain and vascular system, can be a target for autoimmune attack.

Autoimmunity seems to be the medical issue of our time as environmental and other factors promote a loss of immune tolerance to chemicals, toxic and benign, and to self. The resulting chronic inflammation underlies many conditions beyond the strictly defined autoimmune diseases such as MS, SLE and rheumatoid arthritis. Autoimmune inflammation can play a major role in cardiovascular disease, depression, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, migraine, loss of normal apoptosis (leading to malignancy), etc.

Professor Shoenfeld Yehuda, MD, FRCP is head of the Zabludowicz Center for Autoimmune Diseases of Sheba Medical Center (affiliated with Tel-Aviv University), the incumbent of the Laura Schwarz-Kipp Chair for Research of Autoimmune Diseases at Tel-Aviv University, editor-in-chief of the journal Autoimmunity Reviews, and co-editor of the Journal of Autoimmunity. While celebrating vaccination as one of the greatest gifts of medicine in modern times, he explains the mechanism by which adjuvants can trigger autoimmunity. Also in this fascinating lecture he discusses some of the environmental, genetic, endocrine and immune factors that create a susceptibility to autoimmunity in general.