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Research map suggests functioning of immune system altered by staph infections

Research map suggests functioning of immune system altered by staph infections Infectious disease specialists at UT Southwestern Medical Center have been able to map the gene profiles of children with severe Staphylococcus aureus infections. The research map has been able to provide critical insights as to how the immune system of humans gets programmed for responding to the pathogen.

It was also capable of suggesting how the immune system impacts opening of new doors for improved therapeutic interventions. The UT Southwestern researchers remarked that by making the use of gene expression profiling, which is a process summarizing how genes of an individual get activated or suppressed in response to an infection, the response of an immune system to a S aureus infection at the genetic level can be identified.

From News-Medical.Net:

Researchers used blood samples collected between 2001 and 2005 from 77 children - 53 hospitalized at Children’s Medical Center Dallas with invasive S aureus infections and 24 controls. The control samples were collected from healthy children attending either well-child clinic or undergoing elective surgical procedures. Children with underlying chronic diseases, immunodeficiency, multiple infections, and those who received steroids or other immunomodulatory therapies were excluded from the study.

The children ranged in age from a few months to 15 years and included 43 boys and 34 girls. Those with S aureus infections - both methicillin-resistant (MRSA) and methicillin-susceptible (MSSA) - were matched with healthy controls for age, sex and race. The researchers also characterized the extent as well as the type of infection in each patient to make sure that the strain of bacteria didn’t influence the results.

Dr. Monica Ardura, instructor of pediatrics at UT Southwestern and lead author of the study available online in PLoS One, the Public Library of Science’s online journal, remarked that the concerned study was able to make use of existing technology for understanding what is going on in human in a real clinical setting.

It is believed that results of this study would be crucial in identifying and developing breakthrough when it comes to describing function of immune system altered by staph infections.