Family history and your immediate environment are responsible for differences between individual immune systems, according to a new study on immunity of humans.

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The study, called Shaping Variation In The Human Immune System was published in the journal Trends in Immunology, and discusses what shapes our immune system and its potential impact on our health.

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The study has shown that air quality, food, stress levels, sleep patterns, and lifestyle choices had a strong combined effect on immune responses.

Adrian Liston, researcher at the Translational Immunology Laboratory, Belgium said: “Diversity isn’t just programmed into our genes, it emerges from how our genes respond to the environment,”

Long-term infections are responsible for most of the differences between individual immune systems and human interaction can slowly change the cellular makeup of the immune system and make it more sensitive to that specific virus but also easier for other infections to trick its defenses. “People without these infections don’t experience these cellular changes and even with the occasional cold or fever, their immune systems stay relatively stable over time. The exception is when a person is elderly,” Liston added.

Researchers also have data to say that ageing changes how our immune system responds to threats.