据一项新的研究披露,接种麻疹疫苗并不只是保护人们免于感染麻疹病毒,它还能防止其他传染病因免疫系统遭麻疹病毒破坏而乘虚而入。在强调广泛疫苗接种运动的重要性的同时,这些结果可帮助解释为什么麻疹疫苗的推出所防止的死亡人数比研究人员预计的要多得多。Michael Mina和同事分析了英格兰、威尔士、美国和丹麦开始大规模接种麻疹疫苗前后的数据。他们的研究结果表明,麻疹损害了人免疫系统的记忆,使得它忘却了如何击退范围广泛的入侵细菌。尽管先前的研究表明,麻疹会在感染后的几周或多个月内诱导“免疫失忆”,但这项新的研究揭示,这一麻疹诱导的免疫损害可持续2至3年。据研究人员披露,在这段时间内,那些击退了麻疹病毒的人很容易感染诸多的条件性病原体。这一人群水平的分析显示,在麻疹发病率与麻疹感染后2-3年中因其他感染性疾病而死亡之间有关联。它还表明,在所有得到研究的高收入国家中,麻疹疫苗接种对降低其他传染病的死亡率发挥着主要的作用。总之,研究人员的发现意味着,麻疹疫苗可保持免疫系统记忆完整,因此会在一定程度上提供对非麻疹感染的的群体保护。 原文链接: 原文摘要: Immunosuppression after measles is known to predispose people to opportunistic infections for a period of several weeks to months. Using population-level data, we show that measles has a more prolonged effect on host resistance, extending over 2 to 3 years. We find that nonmeasles infectious disease mortality in high-income countries is tightly coupled to measles incidence at this lag, in both the pre- and post-vaccine eras. We conclude that long-term immunologic sequelae of measles drive interannual fluctuations in nonmeasles deaths. This is consistent with recent experimental work that attributes the immunosuppressive effects of measles to depletion of B and T lymphocytes. Our data provide an explanation for the long-term benefits of measles vaccination in preventing all-cause infectious disease. By preventing measles-associated immune memory loss, vaccination protects polymicrobial herd immunity. Understanding the functional consequences of genetic variation, and how it affects complex human disease and quantitative traits, remains a critical challenge for biomedicine. We present an analysis of RNA sequencing data from 1641 samples across 43 tissues from 175 individuals, generated as part of the pilotphase of the Genotype-Tissue expression (GTEx) project. We describe the landscape of gene expressionacross tissues, catalog thousands of tissue-specific and shared regulatory expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) variants, describe complex network relationships, and identify signals from genome-wide association studies explained by eQTLs. These findings provide a systematic understanding of the cellular and biological consequences of human genetic variation and of the heterogeneity of such effects among a diverse set of human tissues.
|