Influence of socioeconomic status trajectories on innate immune responsiveness in children. PLoS One 2012

Objectives: Lower socioeconomic status (SES) is consistently associated with poor health, yet little is known about the biological mechanisms underlying this inequality. In children, we examined the impact of early-life SES trajectories on the intensity of global innate immune activation, recognizing that excessive activation can be a precursor to inflammation and chronic disease. Methods: Stimulated interleukin-6 production, a measure of immune responsiveness, was analyzed ex vivo for 267 Canadian schoolchildren from a 1995 birth cohort in Manitoba, Canada. Childhood SES trajectories were determined from parent-reported housing data using a longitudinal latent-class modeling technique. Multivariate regression was conducted with adjustment for potential confounders. Results: SES was inversely associated with innate immune responsiveness (p = 0.003), with persistently low-SES children exhibiting responses more than twice as intense as their high-SES counterparts. Despite initially lower SES, responses from children experiencing increasing SES trajectories throughout childhood were indistinguishable from high-SES children. Low-SES effects were strongest among overweight children (p,0.01). Independent of SES trajectories, immune responsiveness was increased in First Nations children (p,0.05) and urban children with atopic asthma (p,0.01). Conclusions: These results implicate differential immune activation in the association between SES and clinical outcomes