Word: influenza
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Runny nose, persistent chill, fever, fatigue - these symptoms are all familiar evidence of influenza. But what about a heart attack, suffered 60 years later...
Perhaps the most commonly cited paper is one by researchers at Columbia University, which associated a mother's influenza with her child's risk of mental illness. In that landmark study, researchers collected blood samples from 12,000 pregnant women in Alameda County, California, between 1959 and 1966 and monitored their sons and daughters for more then three decades. Children born to women who had been infected with flu were three to seven times more likely to develop schizophrenia later in life, the study concluded. (See the top 5 swine...
...what is the link between a mother's influenza and her child's cardiac health, physical stature or risk of mental illness? Well, we don't really know. What we do know is that it's probably not the flu virus itself. There is no known biochemical mechanism that links heart disease or other health outcomes to prenatal exposure to flu. And the flu virus, unlike the pathogens that cause herpes, German measles and syphilis, is not teratogenic - that is, it doesn't cause malformations in the fetus, says Dr. Ellen Harrison, the director of obstetrical medicine at the Montefiore...
Researchers' best guess is that a flu infection causes stress in the mother, which might in turn affect fetal development. During pregnancy, a woman's heart and lungs are working substantially harder than usual, and her immune system is compromised, so a few infections (like influenza) may potentially become more intense. Although most pregnant women who get the flu survive with no serious problems, they are still more likely than other healthy adults to also develop respiratory failure and secondary bacterial infections like pneumonia - potentially fatal conditions that may require hospitalization and mechanical ventilation. "It is these severe cases that...
...even if pregnant moms avoid catching the H1N1 flu, the vaccine has other benefits, says Harrison. "The baby of a woman who got the influenza vaccine [during pregnancy] will be born with antibodies to influenza," she says, adding that immunity - albeit temporary - would greatly reduce the chances of the infant coming down with the flu during the first few months of life...