A short excerpt from a YouTube video by Robert Whitfield MD explaining that mast cells protect the body by detecting threats, degranulating, and releasing chemicals (histamine, heparin, cytokines, prostaglandins, tryptase) to activate an immune/inflammatory response intended to temporarily eliminate invaders and then resolve.
Your mast cells are there to protect your body. We want to actually kill off the invaders that come in. So what happens is when mast cells detect a threat, they degranulate and they release all of these different chemicals. So they're releasing histamine, they're releasing heparin, they're releasing cytokines, prostaglandins, tryptase. So they see an invader, they degranulate and they activate an immune response, which actually is part of our inflammatory response. We want inflammation when we there's a threat, we just want inflammation temporarily. Actually kill the threat off and then we relax again. That's super important.
