Whole body cryotherapy in cryo-chamber for treating immune mediated inflammatory diseases
With immune-mediated inflammatory diseases, autoimmune processes have been identified as the ultimate cause or at least as disease inducers. The spectrum of these diseases is large, with cryotherapeutic experience having been gained for the following:
- rheumatoid arthritis,
- Bekhterev’s disease,
- psoriasis, also with arthritis, and
- multiple sclerosis.
How do these diseases come about? The immune system with its highly specialized cells and proteins, the cytokines, fulfills important protective roles for the human organism under physiological conditions. It recognizes harmful factors and wards them off or annihilates them with the help of acute inflammatory reactions (see also section 3.3). In principle the recognition potential already arises during embryonic development and is continuously “trained” over the course of life in the ongoing battle against pathogenic agents. The result is that an effective defense system is maintained. However, it can also become the subject of dysregulation, either in a primary (inborn) or secondary (acquired) manner. Some of its specific properties, namely its ability to refrain from attacking the body’s own tissue structures, so-called immune tolerance, disappear so that autoaggressive immune reactions occur that become expressed in the form of a primary-chronic inflammation resulting in tissue destruction. The reason why this comes about is still largely unclear. However, genetic research does now seem to be shedding more and more light on this “immunological darkness”. As such it was recognized recently that defects on chromosome no. 6 are responsible for the origin of autoimmune diseases including rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis(26). Also for Crohn’s disease, a chronic-inflammatory intestinal disease based also on autoaggression (see also section 4.10 – further indications), a risk gene has been found on chromosome no. 02 46221 221.
Although autoimmune diseases are systemic diseases, i.e. they usually affect the entire organism, they do nevertheless have very specific “success organs” (body areas at which they act specifically and at which disease becomes manifest). These include for example
- the joints with rheumatoid arthritis,
- mainly the spine with Bekhterev’s disease,
- the central nervous system with multiple sclerosis,
- the skin (and joint) with psoriasis (with arthritis)
- the intestine with Crohn’s disease.
A central role in this process is played apparently by the cytokine TNF-α (tumor necrosis factor-α). Its overproduction by cells of the immune system causes a whole chain reaction of inflammatory processes. The autoaggressive function of immune cells is promoted, additional pro-inflammatory cytokines are released and/or activated, and the blood vessel walls become leaky towards aggressive immune cells that can then migrate to the target area. From this immunological knowledge, particularly from the discovery of the destructive effect of TNF-α, highly effective therapies have now been developed.
It is to the credit of Prof Reinhard Fricke that he was the first to point out the possibilities of influencing these disorders of the immune system by using whole body cold applications. With his studies on the whole body cold effect on rheumatoid arthritis and Bekhterev’s disease he was able to demonstrate the (modulating) effect of therapy on the behavior of T-lymphocytes and some cytokines and in so doing identify the targets of whole body cryotherapy with autoimmune diseases.
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