Severe malnutrition in children under five weakens their immune response to infections, worsening health outcomes.Credit: Martin Harvey/ Photodisc/ Getty Images
Severe acute malnutrition (SAM) in children under five weakens their immune response to infections, shows a study in Science Advances, by a research team, from Zambia, Zimbabwe, and the United Kingdom.
“The immune system is the primary defence against infections which are the major cause of death and disability among undernourished children. We know remarkably little about how the human immune system responds to infections in the context of undernutrition,” said Claire Bourke, infection and immunology lecturer at Queen Mary University of London and the study’s co-author.
Bourke, a visiting research fellow at Zvitambo Institute for Maternal and Child Health Research in Zimbabwe told Nature Africa that the team set out to understand how differences in anti-bacterial immune cell function arise and what their implications might be individual children’s recovery.
“We show that SAM shapes how children’s monocytes and neutrophils respond to gram negative bacteria in vitro and that these anti-bacterial responses are associated with their recovery,” she said.
“Our study highlights that treatment approaches for SAM should consider its impact on children’s immune defenses and the potential for incomplete immune rehabilitation to compromise nutritional recovery,” said Bourke.
