Janeway s Immunobiology
EUR 44,48
Janeway s Immunobiology - This book ist a wonderful tool for studying immunology and I recommend to use it. Unfortunately I have to point to one subject that is to critisize because it involves major human and pet diseases.That is the lack of the pregnancy hormone progesterone as a topic of discussion. Besides cortisole progesterone is the mayor hormone for immunmodulation. It changes the cellular immunity to the Th2 type. During pregnancy that ist presumely important for the embryo to protect it from the immune surveillance of the mother.In cancer and several diseases we find the same change of the cellular immunity. Similar to pregnancy natural killer cells are inactivated by progesterone dependent proteins like PIBF (Check JH 2007). PIBF means progesterene induced blocking factor and it blocks the natural killer cells which by this way are hindered to kill tumor cells.Where does the progesterone come from?For example in an old man suffering form carcinoma of the prostate or in a young boy with a medulloblastoma nobody thinks they might suffer from a progesterone induced defect of immune surveillance. Both are not likely to synthesize a hormone to protect embryos.The progesterone is contained in big amouts in eggs and dairy products. Whil eggs constitue only a small amont of our food, dairy products make up a big part of it and today they are produced to about 70% in pregnant cows who naturally produce progesterone. After consumation of food like ice cream, cheese or butter a big increase in progesterone levels can become demonstrated a day later in the saliva (Goodson 2007). Human persons and pet animals getting lots of milk products are not able to fight tumors cells properly and additionally to impaired tumor surveillance they suffer from the adverse effects of embryonal proteins produced under the influence of progesterones, for example the VEGF which induces the growth of new blood vessels. An importent thing for an embryo, but bad for our eyes where the new developing vessels destroy vision or for the skin of atopic persons in which a 25 fold level of progesteron inducible VEGF can become demonstrated.A hormone like progesterone contained in vast amounts in human and pet food can not be skipped in the most important book on immunology. I do not know how this has happend.May be because men think of progesterone as a female hormone which has nothing to do in a text on universel immunolgy. But that ist wrong. Milk born progesterone renders men, women and children helpless to tumors and the progesterone induced proteins are found in kid s tumors like medulloblastoma as in old mens carcinoma of the prostate.So this I hope unconcious ommision leads to the situation that mayor human health problems will not be understood by today and future generations of medical students and physicians.Most tumor markers are embryonal proteins which is even visible from their names like alpha-fetoprotein, CEA carcinoembryonal antigen, PIBK progesterone induced blocking factor. CA15-3 as an embronic protein called MUC1 is progesterone dependent too (Zhang K 1997). In cancer patients it stops the immune reaction against cancer cells and so the tumor is not disturbed to proliferate. Other fetal proteins like the vascular endothelial growth factor VEGF which ist produced progesterone dependent too, help the tumor to acquire blood vessels. Today we fight VEGF in many diseases like colon cancer with antibodies like bevacizumab, but as these antibodies work only against one of many progesterone dependent proteins, the success is limited or absent. The same VEGF associated process occurs during late diabetes where the patients suffer from aberrant vascularization of the retina resulting in blindness or of kidney tissue resulting in the dependency on dialysis. Of cause this process is not limited to diabetes or cancer patients which often do not live long enough to experience it. We see the same process in the eye of otherwise healthy people. There it is called wet age-related macular degeneration and macular edema and treated with a lot of VEGF directed antibodies (Tremolada G 2007).Other progesterone induced proteins might provoke the insulin resistance known as Diabetes type 2 which we often see in breast cancer patients during disease progression. Tumor marker alkaline phosphatase was a progesterone indicator until better methods developed (Zava DT 1998). During pregnancy bone alkaline phosphatase of the mother goes up (Hellmeyer L 2006). The same occurs in patients with rheumatic arthritis (Oelzner P 2007) and in cancer patients with bone bone metastases (Lein M 2007).If the hormone progesterone is skipped from the most important immunology book of the world, and that ist Janeway`s Immunobiology, this debacle should become corrected as quickly as possible. Otherwise most of the Western diet induced diseases can not be understood, treated and even better, avoided by a safe milk production from cows who are not pregnant. Until this happens one can only protect oneself by carefully selecting the own food.