Does hydroxyurea offer any benefits to the immune system?
In recent months, many researchers have been scrambling to find out how strong the immune system really becomes after starting antiviral therapy. After all, someone with 100 T-cells who experiences a 200 T-cell increase after starting antiviral therapy may not be out of the danger zone just yet; we still don’t know how healthy these new T-cells really are. T-cells can be broken down into two different groups: naive T-cells and memory T-cells. Naive T-cells are new T-cells produced by the body that can respond to any disease-causing organism it encounters. Memory T-cells, on the other hand, are needed to respond to organisms that have invaded the body before; it’s much easier for the immune system to respond to the presence of a familiar organism than to a new, unfamiliar one. Infections such as tuberculosis, PCP, and CMV are all kept in check by memory T-cells. At a conference this past winter in Chicago, much new data from studies of hydroxyurea demonstrated that the drug does have an
