Prenatal Maternal Stress and Cord Blood Innate and Adaptive Cytokine Responses in an Inner-city Cohort.
Wright RJ, Visness CM, Calatroni A, Grayson MH, Gold DR, Sandel MT, Lee-Parritz A, Wood RA, Kattan M, Bloomberg GR, Burger M, Togias A, Witter FR, Sperling RS, Sadovsky Y, Gern JE.
Am J Respir Crit Care Med. 2010 Mar 1. [Epub ahead of print]
The Channing Laboratory, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Womenâs Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States; Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
RATIONALE: Stress-elicited disruption of immunity begins in utero.
OBJECTIVES: Associations among prenatal maternal stress and cord blood mononuclear cell (CBMC) cytokine responses were prospectively examined in the Urban Environment and Childhood Asthma Study (N=557 families).
METHODS: Prenatal maternal stress included financial hardship, Difficult Life Circumstances, community violence, neighborhood/block and housing conditions. Factor analysis produced latent variables representing three contexts - individual stressors and ecological-level strains (housing and neighborhood problems) which were combined to create a composite cumulative stress indicator. CBMCs were incubated with innate [lipopolysaccharide, Poly I:C, CpG, peptidoglycan] and adaptive [tetanus, dust mite, cockroach] stimuli, RSV, phytohemagglutinin, or medium alone. Cytokines were measured using multiplex ELISAs. Using linear regression, associations among increasing cumulative stress and cytokine responses were examined adjusting for sociodemographic factors, parity, season of birth, maternal asthma and steroid use, and potential pathway variables (prenatal smoking, birth weight for gestational age).
MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Mothers were primarily minorities [Black (71%), Latino (19%)] with an income <$15,000 (69%). Mothers with the highest cumulative stress were older and more likely to have asthma and deliver lower birth weight infants. Higher prenatal stress was related to increased IL-8 production after microbial (CpG, PIC, PG) stimuli and increased TNF-alpha to microbial stimuli (CpG, PIC). In the adaptive panel, higher stress was associated with increased IL-13 after dust mite stimulation and reduced PHA-induced IFN-gamma.
CONCLUSIONS: Prenatal stress was associated with altered innate and adaptive immune responses in CBMCs. Stress-induced perinatal immunomodulation may impact the expression of allergic disease in these children.
PMID: 20194818 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
