Immunosuppression can be beneficial for certain medical conditions, such as preventing transplant rejection or treating autoimmune diseases. However, it can also make patients vulnerable to infections and requires special care. It can be a deliberate medical act or a side effect of treatment.
In most cases, it’s a good thing that the body’s normal immune response is acting appropriately. Reducing it would lead to things like more infection or less chance of fighting off disease. On the contrary, medical science has discovered that there may be real benefit for a small group of people to take action in the opposite direction. Immunosuppression is the intentional act, or side effect of another treatment, that reduces the immune response and which can be beneficial to people with certain diseases or medical conditions.
Anyone who has heard of transplants has probably heard of the problem of transplant rejection. Since most people receive transplants from other people, the immune system has a tendency to go into overdrive, attacking the new organ and, if successful, rendering it useless. Clearly the immune system is not acting in the best interests of the patient and will likely kill the person receiving the transplant through her actions. With immunosuppression, doctors have a means to interfere with this process.
Once people receive the transplants, they receive a variety of drugs, which are constantly changing in name, dosage, and duration of use, which create an environment of immunosuppression. This can keep the body’s normal immune response in check so that organ rejection begins. While immunosuppression is becoming more specific, it still puts the person receiving the transplant at risk.
A person with a suppressed immune system is more vulnerable to other types of disease because the immune system doesn’t respond as well as it should to fight off normal germs. People who have had transplants, particularly as they are recovering, need special care to ward off the disease. This is difficult to achieve in hospital settings where opportunistic infections abound.
Transplantation is not the only reason immunosuppression might be desirable. In many autoimmune conditions, some form of steroids are used to suppress the inflammatory response attacking the body. People with conditions like lupus or Crohn’s disease can take medications like prednisone or budesonide on a regular basis, so the immune system doesn’t see the body as a “foreign” invader.
It is not uncommon for doctors to use area-specific immunosuppression with steroids. Many allergy and asthma medications are mini-immunosuppressants. These drugs are more site specific and do not have as many negative consequences as systemic steroids.
In some circumstances immunosuppression is not a goal but a price of treatment. People undergoing chemotherapy to treat cancer spend time with weakened immune systems. On the other hand, cancer treatment and bone marrow transplantation at the same time would be eager for this goal, so the new bone marrow was not rejected.
In essence, immunosuppression can be a deliberate medical act to promote healing by shutting down the immune system. It can also be the consequence of medical acts that are also designed to heal, but do so with extraordinary side effects. Diseases can also cause a suppressed immune system, challenging doctors to find ways to boost the immune response so a person is able to fight off disease.
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