Clin affect dis: the study reveals the impact of the first influenza infection on the lifelong immune system

February 2, 2020 / Biovalley BIOON / -- a new study conducted by a team of infectious disease researchers from McMaster University and the University of Montreal shows that the first type of influenza virus we are exposed to in early childhood determines our ability to fight influenza in our lifetime The findings, published recently in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, provide strong evidence to support the phenomenon known as "antigenic imprinting." This could have an important impact on pandemic and pandemic planning, allowing public health sector heads to assess the risk of infection that the general population could face in any future year, based on age and the virus that was the main infection at birth (image source: www Pixabay Com) Professor Matthew Miller, the study's author, said: "people's previous immunity to viruses such as influenza (and even coronaviruses) may have a huge impact on their risk of becoming ill in subsequent epidemics and pandemics So it's really important to understand how their previous immunity has protected them or made them susceptible to infection to help us identify the people who are most at risk during seasonal epidemics and new outbreaks The researchers collected and analyzed data for the 2018-19 flu season The results showed that people born in the H1N1 season were much less sensitive to influenza than those born in the H3N2 season In turn, during the H3N2 epidemic season, people who were born with H3N2 were less likely to be infected with influenza A "We have known from previous studies that susceptibility to specific influenza subtypes may be related to the year of birth This new study further supports the theory of "antigenic imprinting" In this study, we used a unique "natural experiment" to prove that the change of subtype advantage in a season caused the change of age susceptibility in real time, "explained Professor Alain Gagnon, the lead author of the study and head of the Department of demography at the University of Montreal The researchers hope to further explore the transmission dynamics by analyzing how the virus spreads in highly exposed and long-term exposed families In this environment, they can assess how imprinting affects or does not affect the spread of each strain Source of information: new research institutes how first exposure to flu virus sets on our intelligence for life source: Alain Gagnon et al, age specific inclusion of influenza A responses to change in virus subtype domination, clinical infectious diseases (2020) Doi: 10.1093/cid/cia075