AIDS, drugs of abuse, and the neuroimmune axis

This book is the compilation of presentations from a conference on the titled topic. The vast majority of reports present descriptive results, but unfortunately, some of the work appears to have been done with somewhat marginal or obsolescent immunomethodology. The primary audience for this book is those interested in drug abuse and HIV infection. Neuroendocrine immunologists are a secondary audience. An unwritten rule is violated in several chapters. In one there are three times as many authors (25) as there are text pages (8)! Neuroendoimmunology is a rapidly mushrooming and highly relevant field. Many investigators, until recently, have been operating at the periphery of the immunology mainstream (not always by choice), but it is critical that this field now undergoes the same strict scrutiny that other immunobiologic subfields have and are undergoing. The implications that drugs of abuse may somehow facilitate infection with HIV is extraordinarily relevant. Unfortunately, after reading these proceedings, the topic still remains enigmatic. In fact, the most valuable chapter in this book is the last one -- a summary of the panel discussion of this conference where it is explicitly stated that it is still not known definitively whether drugs of abuse have a role in accelerating the course of the HIV disease. This book serves as a focused source of conference papers on an important topic; one hopes that subsequent conferences will move the subject further ahead and provide definitive evidence for or against the interconnection of HIV and drugs of abuse. Parenthetically, some of the most important nuggets of information in this book are actually not related to the latter butare more relevant to the rapidly increasing understanding of the connections between neuroendocrine receptors and immune responses in general.