Strategies for improving your immune health: The different approaches to improving your immune system

January 2007     View PDF     En español

Final thoughts on strategies for
improving your immune system

It has been difficult to devise ways to treat a weakened immune system caused by HIV infection. While HIV infects and destroys immune cells, it also seems to lead to an over-activation of the immune system. This causes its own set of problems. Therefore, “boosting” the immune system in an effort to improve its health could actually increase HIV reproduction and make the situation worse.

Researchers who study immune therapies are extremely cautious when they test new ways to check for immune activation, the negative impacts on HIV reproduction and how a given approach may cause harm. Many if not most of these therapies are tested together with anti-HIV therapy to decrease these potential risks.

Immune therapies under study may seem counterintuitive to some people. For example, several studies have treated HIV with immune suppressive therapies. But if AIDS is a disease of immune deficiency, then why would you suppress the immune system in order to treat it? Part of the reason that cells may not work so well in HIV disease is because they are overactive. Like a group of school children who ate too much sugar, it’s difficult for the cells to focus and be effective in the presence of all this activation. By calming or suppressing the activation it might be possible to improve their function, even if the overall number of cells doesn’t increase.

Also, because HIV takes over the inner working of cells in order to reproduce, suppressing certain factors inside the cell may help cripple HIV from using the cell as a factory. It’s sort of like blocking a car from using the gasoline in its tank so it won’t be able to run. The delicate trick here is to figure how to do this without harming the body. Suppressing these factors may also keep the cell from functioning properly.

More is being learned about the immune system daily as new research tools are devised, but it’s a slow process. While new information emerges, the task becomes trying to understand what it means, what to do with it and how to turn it into studies for new therapies.