Here's some unsubstantiated speculation on my part. If the mechanism of action is multiplying immune cells, then isn't there the chance that the average telomere length of the cells might become smaller? Apparently that's how AIDS wipes out the immune system. Anything to worry about here?
Stephen
Nope. A moderate increase in the rate of production of immune cells from this and other "boosting" supplements would not shorten telomeres to the extent caused by the massive immune-cell replication that occurs during the body's futile attempt to respond to HIV infection You are reading a little too much in-between the lines... telomere shortening is a side-effect of HIV virus infection, not a cause of the immune disfunction, which is directly caused by the virus killing cells.
Telomeres, Shmelomeres! They are not responsible for everything! Folks here sure are obsessed with the telomeres lately, it's sorta funny.
Pardon the aside, but:
HIV infects CD4-helper cells of the immune system, causing them to become factories for more HIV virons in massive numbers, which eventually exhausts the cell's resources and it dies, destroys its physical architecture/infrastructure via the hyperactive virus production it is induced to perform and it dies, or else the CD4 cell recognizes it has become infected and commits apoptosis, or it is recognized by other immune cells as infected and is killed by them.
Now possibly, in the case of the infected CD4 recognizing itself to be infected it commits apoptosis by triggering self-destruct sequence by slicing off all its own telomeres? [in which case artificial telomere-lengthening by resveratrol supplementation might be harmful and interfere with that process?]
Eventually all the CD4-T-helper cells are dying faster than the Thymus can manufacture more, their numbers dwindle lower and lower, which becomes too low to protect the entire body at about a count of 200/ml blood. The shorter telomeres seen in people with advanced HIV are due to the fact that the body is cranking out just immense numbers of generations of new CD4 cells, trying to keep their numbers up as they are destroyed by hummongous numbers of HIV virons (millions and millioons per ml.)
This is disastrous because of the unique and crucial scouting/reporting functions that they perform: a CD4-T-Helper cell recognizes alien DNA of isolated invading pathogenic organisms on their own, or via pathogen DNA being "expressed" by an infected cell [i.e., signaled - it sticks some of the invader's DNA through its outer cell wall in order to say "Hey! Look what icky gunk I got inside me! someone kill me please!"] , then consumes these, then isolates and conveys the DNA sequence of the invader to the Thymus gland, which then designs and instructions production of active cytotoxic hunter-killer cells (rather impressive and scary to observe in action... highly aggressive and violent amoeba-from-hell-like activity) which are programmed to seek and destroy anything showing the offending DNA patterns. An unbelievably sophisticated and intelligent system of many individually functioning specialized cells under direction of the Master Immunity Brain (Thymus) cooperating like a military team of spotters, informants and snipers.
Man, our bodies are such amazing pieces of sophisticated micro-bio-technology! Is there anything DNA cannot do?
LongeCity
