What is Immunomodulation and What Are Immunomodulators?
Executive Summary
- Immunomodulators help moderate the immune system response, and their influence is critical to good health.
Introduction
The immune system can be improved or degraded by our behaviors, diet, and supplementation. Immunomodulators are things that place the immune system into a reactive band that is healthy.
What Do the Health Authorities Say About Immunomodulators?
It is quite instructive to check with the health authorities on immunomodulatory, and their bias immediately appears.
Example #1: American Cancer Society
This is what the American Cancer Society says about immunomodulators.
Immunomodulators are a group of drugs that mainly target the pathways that treat multiple myeloma and a few other cancers. They have many ways to work, including working on the immune system directly by turning down some proteins and turning up others.
Isn’t that interesting? Immunomodulators are the only drugs used to treat cancer, and the American Cancer Society does not even go to the effort to explain this is only one category of immunomodulators.
Example #2: PubMed
PubMed is the publication website for the National Institutes of Health. I found an article on immunomodulators at this link.
The main objectives are to present the different adverses effects of the immunomodulatory drugs that can impair the quality of life of the immunosupressed patients and study the impact of immunomodualtion on oral diseases.
Immunomodulatory drugs modify the response of the immune system by increasing (immunostimulators) or decreasing (immunosuppressives) the production of serum antibodies (1). Immunostimulators are prescribed to enhance the immune response against infectious diseases, tumours, primary or secondary immunodeficiency, and alterations in antibody transfer, among others (2).
Once more, we discuss immunomodulating drugs. This is ok, as a specific paper can be on any subcategory of the topic. However, like the American Cancer Society article, this paper did not cover anything related to immunomodulation outside of drugs.
This is just the introduction to the article. The full article at our subscription site, which covers this and many other medical topics.