Covid-19 and the Human Immunology: Adverse Effects of Substance Abuse on human Immunity
As the ongoing COVID-19 crisis crosses barriers and borders from the most advanced communities to developing ones with hardly exceptions. Health experts are clueless about a cure anytime soon. More than 13 million cases with casualties nearly 576,675, among these casualties, the majority of 95.7 % belong to people aged 45 years or older.
Above data shows the vulnerability of older and addicted young people with decreased immunity is it as it looks like, Absolutely not, deterioration in immunity can occur at any age depends on several factors such as nutrition level of the body, mental disorders and smoking or substance abuse in which alcohol abuse hold bigger part but addiction always indicates poor mental health.
In this pandemic, it becomes critical to take strong steps to maintain the immunity level as high as we can to protect ourselves in such an infected world. Now the question is how substance and opioid abuse are responsible for Low immunity?
In contemporary research and studies concerning the relationship between the use of addictive substances of abuse and the increased incidence of vulnerability to infectious diseases, including AIDS. These studies have shown that drugs of abuse, including marijuana, cocaine, opiates, alcohol, and nicotine, alter not only neuropsychological and pathophysiological responses of individuals but also immune processes.
Such investigations substantiate the earlier correlative observations that the use of these drugs is associated with enhanced susceptibility to infectious diseases.
The mechanisms by which abused substances increase susceptibility to infections in humans have begun to be traced. From the studies, it seems that all five classes of drugs affect the immune system through both indirect and direct mechanisms. One indirect method is drug-induced, which results in glucocorticoid production and regulation of the immune system.
In accumulation, these abused substances have direct actions on immune cells that seem to be receptor-mediated for all of the drugs except alcohol. Studies of receptor-mediated effects on immunity and infection have been performed in detail with opiates and to a lesser degree with cannabinoids, and have just been started with nicotine. Another common mechanism of action among the five classes of these abused drugs is their effect on immune responses.
The correlation between IVDUs- Intravenous Drug Users and HIV infections has led many experimenters to suggest that the immunomodulation mediated by drugs is a major component contributing to the progression of AIDS in IVDUs and increases the susceptibility to COVID-19 too. While it is impossible to specify the cause-and-effect relationships from epidemiological analyses, there is a rising consensus among investigators of drug abuse that immunomodulation induced by drugs is evident.
Observations of immunosuppression by drugs of abuse are aiding increased susceptibility to opportunistic infectious pathogens by altering the immune reaction. However, there is still convincing evidence that the social practices connected with drug abuse also provide increased exposure to infectious pathogens. In the end, it logically comes off that it will be a combination of increased exposure and drug-induced immunomodulation that leads to increased susceptibility to infectious pathogens. A collaborative enterprise, however, is essential to determine the mechanisms by which drugs compromise immune responses in general against the immunosuppressive viruses.
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