Host iron deficiency protects against <i>Plasmodium</i> infection and drives parasite molecular reprofiling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Iron deficiency, anemia and Plasmodium infection represent significant global health challenges with overlapping geographical distributions, particularly affecting pregnant women in Africa, yet the mechanisms underlying their interactions remain poorly understood. We employed a multilayered approach combining clinical data from Malawian pregnant women (n=711) in the REVAMP trial, a genetic mouse model (Tmprss6-knockout), and in vitro P. falciparum cultures to clarify associations between iron status and malaria susceptibility. Iron deficiency was associated with 50% reduced P. falciparum parasitemia in pregnant women (95% CI [30%-64%], p<0.0001), while iron-deficient mice exhibited significantly improved survival against P. berghei (median 15.5 days vs. 7.0 days for WT mice) and protection from cerebral malaria (83% vs 17% survival). Iron chelation induced substantial transcriptomic and proteomic changes in cultured parasites, affecting host cell invasion and nutrient acquisition processes. Importantly, intravenous iron supplementation did not increase subsequent parasitemia when coupled with malaria prevention. These findings demonstrate that iron deficiency protects against Plasmodium infection and support WHO recommendations for iron supplementation in malaria-endemic regions when combined with adequate malaria prevention strategies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".