We think that people who have chronic aspergillosis may have slight differences in their immune system compared with people who do not seem to be vulnerable to aspergillosis. One way we might be able to help patients fight off aspergillosis may well be to find ways to adjust or even correct the immune differences that cause those vulnerabilities and this book talks about our increasing knowledge and power to do just that in many other diseases. The same techniques may be used to help people with respiratory illness’ such as aspergillosis – indeed they already are as anyone who is being given Xolair to treat ABPA has found out.
This book explains where we have got to so far but it will already be significantly out of date as the pace of research will have already taken us beyond the information available when this book was written, but it is still worth reading for all the background knowledge it contains.
The book is written by an expert in our immune systems and he also goes on to tell us how we may improve the health of our bodies by limiting our exposure to factors that damage our immune systems without us even realising it. Stress is one such factor and there is an ever increasing number of tools we can use to start to fight back against the stress most of us will feel in our day to day lives, especially if you have a chronic illness.
A brave new world of immune system therapies – harnessing the body’s own defences – could help treat all kinds of different illnesses, according to one of the UK’s leading immunologists.
In his new book ‘The Beautiful Cure: Harnessing your body’s natural defences’, Professor Dan Davis from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester, says this also raises vital new issues for society, not least being how we cope with the expense of new medicines.
The book, published by Random House, describes the scientific quest to understand how the immune system works, and how it is unlocking a revolutionary approach to our fight with disease.
The journey to a modern understanding of the immunity can be attributed to Charles Janeway, who first expanded our understanding of innate immunity, the body’s first line of defence against infection in the late 1980’s. Then followed a global adventure of digging into cells and molecules, leading to discoveries about how immune cells switch on and off in their fight with disease.
“Take one example,” Davis says: “Immunologists have learnt how to switch off a brake on the immune system – to unleash its power more forcefully in fighting cancer.”
“Another example is how anti-TNF therapy was developed for arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease.
“But these successes are probably still just the tip of the iceberg. All kinds of different diseases could feasibly be tackled with immune system therapies: cancers, viral infections, arthritis, and a range of other conditions.
“There are many other break receptors in the immune system which can switch off specific types of immune cells. We must now test whether or not blocking these, alone or in combination, can unleash immune cells to tackle different types of disease.”
He added: “We also know that stress has a vital influence on the immune system. This raises crucial questions about whether practices that reduce stress, like tai chi and mindfulness, can help our fight with disease.
“A new detailed knowledge of how our immune system works has unlocked a revolutionary new approach to medicine and well-being.”
The book is available in bookshops and online.
Submitted by GAtherton on Mon, 2018-02-05 13:37