The influence of prenatal maternal stress on postnatal immunity in offspring
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Current epidemiological evidence suggests that asthma and allergic conditions have an etiological component rooted in prenatal development. One of the associated risk factors is the exposure of the conceptus to prenatal maternal stress (PNMS). Current information on the effects of PNMS on postnatal immunity is limited to animal studies with scattered methodologies and two human studies with methodological constraints. The present state of knowledge does not allow drawing definitive conclusions and new studies are needed. Objectives: The main goal of the study presented in this thesis is to analyze the influence of PNMS on the immune system, and to determine which factors from the stressor and the stressed subject are relevant for this phenomenon. Methods: A comprehensive review of the animal literature was conducted to determine which aspects of immunity are most affected by PNMS, which factors intervene in this relationship, and what are the potentially global consequences of PNMS-induced changes on postnatal immunity and health. The available studies were analyzed by the timing (by Window of Vulnerability), type and duration/frequency of the stressor, and by the species, sex and age at assessment of the offspring. These conclusions were used to construct the hypotheses to test in Project Ice Storm, a human study that has been assessing prospectively the consequences of PNMS exposure caused by a natural disaster. Immunity was tested in 37 adolescents (average age 13½ years) whose mothers were pregnant at the time of the storm, measuring their major leukocyte populations and cytokine production capacity using flow cytometry. Results: The review of the animal literature indicated that PNMS affects multiple aspects of postnatal immunity. The most replicated findings were changes in the production of immune-inflammatory mediators (cytokines), and alterations in cell populations. Globally, PNMS might induce the development of a T-helper 2 immune phenotype, which potentially explains the epidemiological link between asthma and PNMS. The timing of the exposure to PNMS was determinant for the effect of PNMS on T lymphocyte populations, and the sex of the offspring influenced the manifestation and direction of cytokine production changes. The human study confirmed that PNMS influences postnatal immunity, indicated that PNMS effects depend on the objective exposure to the stressor rather than on maternal distress, showed that there is an enhanced but not exclusive vulnerability of CD4+ cells to PNMS in early pregnancy, and showed that IL-1β, IL-6 and TNF-α were altered, with TNF-alpha showing different levels in males and females. Conclusion: PNMS exposure has long-term consequences on immunity in animals and humans. Its effects are pervasive and determined by factors from the stressor and the subject. Some of the alterations induced by PNMS could be linked to the development of immune-related disorders such as asthma.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".