Complement System Activation Is a Plasma Biomarker Signature during Malaria in Pregnancy.

Malaria in pregnancy (MiP) is a public health problem in malaria-endemic areas, contributing to detrimental outcomes for both mother and fetus. Primigravida and second-time mothers are most affected by severe anemia complications and babies with low birth weight compared to multigravida women. Infected erythrocytes (IE) reach the placenta, activating the immune response by placental monocyte infiltration and inflammation.

Adverse pregnancy outcomes are associated with Plasmodium vivax malaria in a prospective cohort of women from the Brazilian Amazon.

Background: Malaria in Brazil represents one of the highest percentages of Latin America cases, where approximately 84% of infections are attributed to Plasmodium (P.) vivax. Despite the high incidence, many aspects of gestational malaria resulting from P.

Inflammasome activation and IL-1 signaling during placental malaria induce poor pregnancy outcomes.

Placental malaria (PM) is associated with severe inflammation leading to abortion, preterm delivery, and intrauterine growth restriction. Innate immunity responses play critical roles, but the mechanisms underlying placental immunopathology are still unclear. Here, we investigated the role of inflammasome activation in PM by scrutinizing human placenta samples from an endemic area and ablating inflammasome components in a PM mouse model.

TRPV1 Contributes to Cerebral Malaria Severity and Mortality by Regulating Brain Inflammation.

Transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) is a Ca-permeable channel expressed on neuronal and nonneuronal cells, known as an oxidative stress sensor. It plays a protective role in bacterial infection, and recent findings indicate that this receptor modulates monocyte populations in mice with malaria; however, its role in cerebral malaria progression and outcome is unclear. By using TRPV1 wild-type (WT) and knockout (KO) mice, the importance of TRPV1 to this cerebral syndrome was investigated.

Association of Malaria Infection During Pregnancy With Head Circumference of Newborns in the Brazilian Amazon.

Importance: Malaria during pregnancy is associated with adverse events for the fetus and newborn, but the association of malaria during pregnancy with the head circumference of the newborn is unclear.

Objective: To investigate the association of malaria during pregnancy with fetal head growth.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Two cohort studies were conducted at the general maternity hospital of Cruzeiro do Sul (Acre, Brazil) in the Amazonian region.

Fetal-Derived MyD88 Signaling Contributes to Poor Pregnancy Outcomes During Gestational Malaria.

Placental malaria (PM) remains a severe public health problem in areas of high malaria transmission. Despite the efforts to prevent infection poor outcomes in endemic areas, there is still a considerable number of preterm births and newborns with low birth weight resulting from PM. Although local inflammation triggered in response to malaria is considered crucial in inducing placental damage, little is known about the differential influence of maternal and fetal immune responses to the disease progression.

Publisher Correction: TLR4-Mediated Placental Pathology and Pregnancy Outcome in Experimental Malaria.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper.

TLR4-Mediated Placental Pathology and Pregnancy Outcome in Experimental Malaria.

Malaria-associate pregnancy has a significant impact on infant morbidity and mortality. The detrimental effects of malaria infection during pregnancy have been shown to correlate with immune activation in the placental tissue. Herein we sought to evaluate the effect of Toll-like receptors (TLRs) activation on placental malaria (PM) development by using the Plasmodium berghei NK65 infection model.