tetano
Editor, Senior Moderator
When pregnant women get influenza, they tend to get really sick. Flu complications such as pneumonia are more common in pregnant women than other healthy young adults, and their risk of death from flu is higher, too.
Until now, doctors have ascribed the problem to the fact that the immune system is tamped down by pregnancy, a protective mechanism that keeps the woman’s body from rejecting her fetus. But a new Stanford study, the first ever to directly examine how a pregnant woman’s immune cells respond to flu viruses, found something unexpected: Instead of responding sluggishly, immune cells from pregnant women actually over-react to the flu.
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http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-ne...p--not-down--by-flu-during-pregnancy--st.html
Until now, doctors have ascribed the problem to the fact that the immune system is tamped down by pregnancy, a protective mechanism that keeps the woman’s body from rejecting her fetus. But a new Stanford study, the first ever to directly examine how a pregnant woman’s immune cells respond to flu viruses, found something unexpected: Instead of responding sluggishly, immune cells from pregnant women actually over-react to the flu.
...
http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-ne...p--not-down--by-flu-during-pregnancy--st.html