Vaccination activates the immune system. That’s what it’s designed to do.
Is this the meaning of “research”? To repeatedly search, find and forget? It’s a hell of a way to make a living.
Inflammation stresses out brain development
A new study reveals that maternal immune activation promotes sex-biased activation of the integrated stress response in the developing mouse brain and that this mechanistically contributes to the onset of autism-related behaviors uniquely in male offspring.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is one of the most prevalent neurodevelopmental disorders, with current estimates identifying a diagnosis of one child out of every 54 in the US1. Epidemiological reports and recent experimental evidence together suggest that activation of a mother’s immune response during pregnancy may contribute to the etiology of neurodevelopmental disorders2,3,4. Indeed, various triggers of maternal immune activation (MIA)—including multiple pathogen-derived stimuli, environmental irritants and autoinflammatory conditions—have been reported to induce cortical abnormalities, circuit dysfunction and behavioral changes in animal models5,6,7,8,9,10,11.
While there is emerging evidence that gestational inflammation can perturb fetal brain development, the cellular and molecular events that promote neural dysfunction in MIA offspring remain incompletely understood. In the current issue of Nature Neuroscience, Kalish et al. find, in mice, that sex-dependent induction of the integrated stress response in developing cortical cells contributes to altered neurodevelopment and precipitates autistic-related behaviors in offspring exposed to maternal inflammation. These findings expand our understanding of the sex bias and etiology of autism-related neurodevelopmental disorders12. …
Maternal immune activation induces sustained changes in fetal microglia motility
Maternal infection or inflammation causes abnormalities in brain development associated with subsequent cognitive impairment and in an increased susceptibility to schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders. Maternal immune activation (MIA) and increases in serum cytokine levels mediates this association via effects on the fetal brain, and microglia can respond to maternal immune status, but consensus on how microglia may respond is lacking and no-one has yet examined if microglial process motility is impaired. In this study we investigated how MIA induced at two different gestational ages affected microglial properties at different developmental stages. Immune activation in mid-pregnancy increased IL-6 expression in embryonic microglia, but failed to cause any marked changes in morphology either at E18 or postnatally. In contrast MIA, particularly when induced earlier (at E12), caused sustained alterations in the patterns of microglial process motility and behavioral deficits. Our research has identified an important microglial property that is altered by MIA and which may contribute to the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms linking maternal immune status to subsequent risks for cognitive disease…..