If alcohol is an immunosuppressant, and your testing for an antibody, like say for an std or other disease, doctors say unless you’re chronically immunosuppressed you’ll be positive. But if you’re drinking a lot out of anxiety, and you take the test and it’s negative, can’t alcohol suppress the immune system enough to cause the false negative? Or is it just due to the extent of say HIV or an immunosuppressant drug is WAYYY more suppressing than alcohol.
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The term immunosuppressed is a spectrum, with no clear definition at which point someone is suddenly “immunosuppressed.” Some diseases certainly have that definition. Like we have clear criteria at which it goes from HIV infection to AIDS. But as an overall term of immunosuppression, there’s no clear definition, just clinical effects.
For example, Diabetes can cause immunosuppression (which is why diabetics are prone to infections and are recommended to receive one of the pneumonia vaccines at younger ages). If someone is having recurrent infections, we definitely try to get the diabetes under better control (and it’s why in the hospital, we give insulin for strict control while someone is acutely sick).
However, that’s completely different than someone who is on immunosuppressant medications for autoimmune conditions or who recently received transplants. And that’s different from someone on chronic steroids.
A lot of these tests have false positive and false negatives, and it’s important to consider the pre-test possibility and chronic conditions in interpreting the results.
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