ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2018
Ectoparasite defence in humans: relationships to pathogen avoidance and clinical implications.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Neuroimmune Pain and Its Manipulation by Pathogens.Evolutionary applications · 2025Article
- Trypophobia, skin disease, and the visual discomfort of natural textures.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Pupillary Responses to Dot Patterns on a Human Face Background.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Emotional and visual responses to trypophobic images with object, animal, or human body backgrounds: an eye-tracking study.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Disgust sensitivity and psychopathic behavior: A narrative review.Translational neuroscience · 2024Review
- Demodicosis in Different Age Groups and Alternative Treatment Options-A Review.Journal of clinical medicine · 2023Review
- Depth perception between dots and the background face reduces trypophobic discomfort.BMC psychology · 2022Article
- Action-Shapers and Their Neuro-Immunological Foundations.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The skin crawls, the stomach turns: ectoparasites and pathogens elicit distinct defensive responses in humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Ticks, Hair Loss, and Non-Clinging Babies: A Novel Tick-Based Hypothesis for the Evolutionary Divergence of Humans and Chimpanzees.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Crowd Salience Heightens Tolerance to Healthy Facial Features.Adaptive human behavior and physiology · 2021Article
- Human Ectoparasites Are Highly Prevalent in the Rural Communities of Northwest Ethiopia: A Community-Based Cross-Sectional Study.Environmental health insights · 2021Article
- Derationalizing Delusions.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2021Review
- Conducting exposure and response prevention treatment for contamination fears during COVID-19: The behavioral immune system impact on clinician approaches to treatment.Journal of anxiety disorders · 2020Article
- Susceptibility to infection with Borrelia afzelii and TLR2 polymorphism in a wild reservoir host.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Evolution of pathogen and parasite avoidance behaviours.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- The structure and function of pathogen disgust.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Review of the gastric physiology of disgust: Proto-nausea as an under-explored facet of the gut-brain axis.Brain and neuroscience advancesReview
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Currently, disgust is regarded as the main adaptation for defence against pathogens and parasites in humans. Disgust's motivational and behavioural features, including withdrawal, nausea, appetite suppression and the urge to vomit, defend effectively against ingesting or touching sources of pathogens. However, ectoparasites do not attack their hosts via ingestion, but rather actively attach themselves to the body surface. Accordingly, by itself, disgust offers limited defence against ectoparasites. We propose that, like non-human animals, humans have a distinct ectoparasite defence system that includes cutaneous sensory mechanisms, itch-generation mechanisms and grooming behaviours. The existence of adaptations for ectoparasite defence is supported by abundant evidence from non-human animals, as well as more recent evidence concerning human responses to ectoparasite cues. Several clinical disorders may be dysfunctions of the ectoparasite defence system, including some that are pathologies of grooming, such as skin picking and trichotillomania, and others, such as delusory parasitosis and trypophobia, which are pathologies of ectoparasite detection. We conclude that future research should explore both distinctions between, and overlap across, ectoparasite defence systems and pathogen avoidance systems, as doing so will not only illuminate proximate motivational systems, including disgust, but may also reveal important clinical and social consequences.This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue 'Evolution of pathogen and parasite avoidance behaviours'.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.