Flu during pregnancy is risky for the child
Christiane Fux studied journalism and psychology in Hamburg. The experienced medical editor has been writing magazine articles, news and factual texts on all conceivable health topics since 2001. In addition to her work for, Christiane Fux is also active in prose. Her first crime novel was published in 2012, and she also writes, designs and publishes her own crime plays.
More posts by Christiane Fux All content is checked by medical journalists.Pregnant women are not only very often seriously ill with the flu - the viral infection also puts a strain on the child. According to various studies, the offspring are particularly susceptible to infections in the first few months of life.
Researchers working with Henning Jacobsen and Gülşah Gabriel from the Leibniz Institute for Experimental Virology (HPI) have now been able to understand how this happens in experiments with mice.
More susceptible to infection
To do this, the scientists infected pregnant mice with influenza A viruses through the nose. The result: their young not only grew more slowly than the offspring of uninfected mice, but were also more susceptible to viral and bacterial infections.
The researchers found that in these young animals, the scavenger cells in the alveoli (alveolar macrophages) in particular were more difficult to recognize pathogens and were therefore less effective at eliminating them.
In addition, the production of blood cells, including the white blood cells that function as immune cells, was impaired in baby mice from dams infected with influenza. In addition, there was a lower birth weight of the young animals.
The unfavorable development is triggered, among other things, by inflammatory substances such as the so-called inflammatory cytokines in the mother's lungs. Such an immune activation in the mother's body can favor not only the weakened immune defense but also neurological diseases. Previous studies have shown that high cytokine levels are associated with a higher risk of schizophrenia and autism.
"The findings in the new animal model now show for the first time that there is a clear causality between the viral infection during pregnancy and the increased vulnerability of the offspring to infections," said Gabriel.
However, it must be said that the results of animal experiments cannot be transferred one-to-one to humans.
Influenza vaccination protects mother and child
However, the results of the study provide another argument that pregnant women should get the flu vaccine - as experts recommend anyway. During pregnancy, the immune system shuts down. This prevents the maternal immune system from fighting the child in the abdomen.
In the event of an infection, the mother's defense against the flu virus is less effective. This favors a severe course of the disease, which then endangers mother and child.
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