Antiviral therapy with non-selective beta-blockers: preliminary experimental and clinical corroboration.
Treatment with non-selective beta-blockers has been proposed to have an indirect antiviral activity acting via an enhanced performance of the immune system, and the mechanism of this activity has been laid out earlier. Experimental and clinical findings are presented that corroborate the hypothesis that inhibiting the immunosuppressive and stress-related cAMP-PKA pathway will enhance the immune system's ability to recognize foreign antigen and to access its vast repertory in an improved way, resulting in an indirect antiviral activity. Other drugs having an inhibitory effect on the cAMP-PKA pathway in cells of the immune system and therefore expected to have a comparable activity spectrum with different specific side-effects are presented, for example aspirin. Additionally the so far unexplained anticancer activity of aspirin is related to the same mechanism of an enhanced performance of the immune system.