Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK.
Trends Parasitol. 2011 Jul;27(7):300-5. doi: 10.1016/j.pt.2011.03.012. Epub 2011 Apr 30.
Immunopathology (immune-mediated pathology) is a ubiquitous cause of disease during infection, but how will parasite exploitation strategies evolve in its presence? Immunopathology can act to increase parasite fitness if it increases transmission rate, but can equally act to decrease parasite fitness if it increases host mortality. The focus here is on understanding how immunopathology, mediated through different immune mechanisms, can influence parasite fitness and how experimental manipulations of the immune system can be carried out to examine this. A better understanding of how parasite fitness scales with, or responds to, immunopathology is crucial to understanding the nature of selection acting on parasite virulence traits and will allow more informed predictions to be made regarding the trajectory of parasite virulence evolution.
免疫病理学（免疫介导的病理学）是感染过程中疾病的普遍原因，但寄生虫的利用策略将如何在其存在的情况下进化？如果免疫病理学增加了传播率，它可以增加寄生虫的适应性，但如果它增加了宿主的死亡率，它同样可以降低寄生虫的适应性。这里的重点是了解免疫病理学如何通过不同的免疫机制影响寄生虫的适应性，以及如何进行免疫系统的实验操作来检验这一点。更好地理解寄生虫的适应性如何与免疫病理学相关或对其作出反应，对于理解作用于寄生虫毒力特征的选择性质至关重要，并将允许对寄生虫毒力进化的轨迹作出更明智的预测。
