Talk:Adjuvant

RFC: Vaccine template on this article and elsewhere

User:Ombudsman wishes the vacine template to be applied to this article. I think this is neither needed nor useful.

To take the process to extremes, we could end up with glass - used for the ampoule - being templated as a vaccine article because vaccines may be put up in glass ampoules. Sealed with rubber, diluted with water or saline as the usual diluent before being drawn up with a needle into a syringe.

There is no special reason to leave out any of those if "adjuvant" is templated so.

Contrariwise, each and any of these words may be linked to by square bracketting it, and this does not contribute to making WP a book where everythign is about vaccines. Midgley 13:42, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Caffeine/Paracetamol

The article presently states:

For instance, caffeine has minimal analgesic effect on its own, but may have an adjuvant effect when given with paracetamol.

My understanding, which may very well be incorrect, was that caffeine was given with paracetamol because a common source of pain in Western societies is caffeine withdrawal. If this is a true adjuvant, and some synergy is happening here, that I am unaware of, can this be cited? Thanks Brianski 06:27, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it can be cited in several scientific articles, e.g. Neuropharmacology 2000 Aug 23;39(11):2205-13

While adjuvant processes are often not properly understood and hard to calculate in any precise matter, due to the complexity of interacting variables, these effects have often been overlooked - hence rather nonsensical warnings that this and that medicine might interact in unexpected ways, consult your physician. This is often the case with natural remedies, like st.johns wort. I am however, befuddled as to the difference between adjuvant effects and catalysts. User:84.48.100.222 3 Sept 2006

Adverse effects of adjuvants

The article has the following sentence in the section on immunology:

Aluminum salts are used in some human vaccines [1], although a recent study [2] revealed aluminum adjuvants can cause neuron death.

However, the reference for the recent study links to a web article which cites unpublished data. Furthermore, the article suggests that the study did not look solely at adjuvants, but rather anthrax immunization. Thus, it is unclear that the study would at all support the conclusion that aluminum adjuvants cause neuron death. I recommend removal of this sentence until the experimental results have been published and can be evaluated. 128.95.11.93 23:48, 23 January 2007 (UTC)David J. Phippard

Immunologic adjuvant (vaccine)

Although it is often believed that the adjuvant has few if any direct effects when given by themselves, in the case of vaccines this is not quite the whole truth. Most immunological adjuvants have traditionally been toxic at the molecular level, although the details of the toxins used are not always easily obtained to layperson, e.g. whilst the widely successful older whooping cough vaccines did utilise mercury compounds thiomersal, and whilst may act as an adjuvant the company that produced it (Eli Lilly) have always claimed it is there purely as a preservative although again this information may not be available online or in your local library. It is rarely used in vaccines today, although was widely used up until 1999, and most people alive today have been exposed to it, as many have also been exposed to amalgam dental fillings. It is probably safer to believe the pharmaceutical company in this regard. Even Edward Jenner who famously risked a peasant childs life to prove his hypothesis that mostly-harmless cowpox exposure would protect against mostly-deadly smallpox, some people forget to mention that the cowpox was actually a preparation of cowpox pus almost certainly containing all manner of degraded bacterial toxins and milkmaid dead-cell debris. So whilst the adjuvant alone will not protect you, indeed there is much debate as to the harm these molecules can cause (what is a safe dosage etc), they are essentially a necessarily evil if you choose to opt-in to vaccines potential protective benefits. The fact that many vaccination trials fail may frequently be due to the fact that a suitably designed 'nudge' from the adjuvant is not provided. The difficulty in designing a vaccine that works well is a matter of getting the balance right between protection (both 'rapid'&short term and long term (i.e. immunological memory)) and limiting the possible negative side-effects, that at worst may cause vaccine injury, in addition to choosing an appropriate particle/protein/peptide etc from the pathogen in question. JameboyXYZ (talk) 19:00, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Cleanup suggestions

This article needs a huge amount of cleanup. Top priorities are:

• Increasing the scope of the article. Otherwise, we might as well just merge it into the immunologic adjuvant article. "Adjuvant" refers to a huge variety of things, not just cancer adjuvant therapy and vaccine adjuvants. One example is adjuvant in agricultural sprays.
• Increasing the verifiability of the article. I've gone and taken out a jumbled paragraph and added a couple of sources, but it still needs more work.

The article needs more content in general, but it particularly needs work as it comes to those two issues. —Preceding unsigned comment added by CarbonWire (talk • contribs) 05:37, 28 August 2010 (UTC)

I agree; Almost all of this article seems to be about immunological adjuvants. Most content should be moved there ? leaving this article as a disambiguation ? - Rod57 (talk) 19:48, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

Thiomersol

Thiomersol is primarily used as a preservative. I've only found one paper that talks about it as anything like an adjuvant, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3371072, and there it's described as a "hapten", "a small molecule that can elicit an immune response only when attached to a large carrier such as a protein". Since it's not linked to a large carrier in any known vaccine, we should probably remove Thiomersol from the adjuvant page.DanielKegel (talk) 03:02, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree. Thimerosal is an antiseptic, not an adjuvant. DocHolliday (talk) 06:10, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Removed Beryllium

I removed beryllium from the list of adjuvants, since it is not used in that application because of its toxicity. Beryllium might be classified as a sensitizing agent, but that is not the same as an adjuvant. --Zeamays (talk) 16:13, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

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