It Looks Like Newborns' Immune Systems Are Stronger Than We Thought
Stop babying your baby. That's the main takeaway from a new study, that found newborns' immune systems are much stronger than previously thought. Scientists used to think that the littlest humans among us had underdeveloped T cells, which are basically our bodies' defenders against infections. Now, thanks to Dr. Deena Gibbons, lead author of the report and an expert at London's Department of Immunobiology, we know that babies aren't as helpless as we imagine them to be.
Previous research on newborns found that their T cells would not trigger the inflammatory response that T cells in adults do. That response is what triggers the antibodies to fight off bacteria and other bad news cells. Since T cells are needed to fight viruses and severe diseases, experts were right to be worried about our little dudes and dudettes. But Gibbons was skeptical of this research. She thought that we just might have been misreading what newborns' T cells are doing.
To dig deeper into the baby T cell mystery, Gibbons and her team studied blood samples from 28 premie babies from when they were born through the first three weeks of their lives. What she found was that the T cells were acting differently, but not in a bad way. In fact, while they were suppressed and didn't trigger the inflammatory response, they did manufacture an anti-bacterial cell called IL8, which fought off infections. Scientists had known about IL8 for some time, but didn't realize it had this function in newborns until now.
"We found that babies have an in-built anti-bacterial defense mechanism that works differently to adults, but nevertheless may be effective in protecting them," Gibbons told ScienceDaily. "This may also be a mechanism by which the baby protects itself in the womb from infections of the mother. The next stage of our work will be to better understand the pathways that result in the immune cells of newborns being so different to those in adults."
Gibbons' study received some support from another report, by Dr. Sing Sing Way, an infectious disease expert, who found that babies' immune systems are suppressed on purpose. By shutting down the inflammatory response, the newborn's system allows good bacteria to flourish.
"The experiments, which were done in a lab with mice and blood samples from human infants' umbilical cords, show that certain red blood cells, known as CD71 cells, rein in the newborn immune system," reported NPR. "That could create a welcoming environment for beneficial microbes, the researchers say, in a way that an adult immune system can't."
Of course none of this means you can finally roll your baby around in a pile of garbage and expect it to be fine. It will still get sick; this research just shows we don't need to be as cautious as we have been in the past. But hey, would you like to maybe talk about why you want to roll your baby around in garbage? Because that's weird.
[Image via Flickr - Jan de Graff]
