People on immunosuppressants are at a greater cancer risk. Can the same be said for frequent users of antihistamines?
In: Biology
Histamine is a key mediator of the immune system, so this is a fair question.
The answer, however, is that there’s no known risk of cancer associated with antihistamines (which for all intents and purposes means that there isn’t one, because if there were we’d have noticed it by now).
There are a couple of issues here, but let’s focus on the big one — what does the immune system do? It has a number of roles, including killing viruses, bacteria, fungi, worms and parasites, anything ‘foreign’, and even tumours (cancer) as well. Each of these roles is supported by specialised cells and molecules which work to eliminate specific targets.
The part of the immune system that kills tumours is broadly responsible for killing all ‘growths’ inside our body that shouldn’t be there. This includes transplanted organs. So we turn it off, which increases the risk of cancer, but allows the organ to survive. Histamine isn’t a very important part of that arm of the immune system, so when we block it, the anti-tumour defenses still work perfectly well.
Of course, the immune system and its role in cancer is massively complex. Some parts fight tumours and destroy them, other parts, when activated for too long, can actually promote cancer growth. But the simple answer is that tumour defense and attacking transplanted organs are the same part of the system, so we have to turn one off to keep the other at bay. Histamine is a different part, so we can safely switch that off without worrying about cancer.
No. Why would they? All antihistamines do is block histamine receptors. They don’t do anything to the immune system.
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