Why are children now more likely to have immune disorders?
Our new research aims to understand why auto immune disorders, where the body's defense system attacks its own healthy cells, are on the rise among Australian children.
Several immune related disorders such as allergy, type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis (MS) have higher disease rates in modern times. Internationally, the annual increase in type 1 diabetes from 1960 to 1996 was 2.5%. In 2004, National Diabetes Registry data shows that 982 children aged less than 15 years developed type 1 diabetes for the first time in Australia.
In the first few years of life, when a child's immune system is exposed to infection it learns to attack the bad guys and leave healthy cells alone.
"Over the last century, these infectious diseases have declined and as they have, we've had a rise in these immune system disorders," said Professor Anne-Louise Ponsonby, group leader of Environmental and Genetic Epidemiology Research. "So we think this has to do with the way the immune system is trained."
In the case of MS there is growing evidence that disordered immunity to the Epstein Barr Virus, a common infant infection, may play a key role in triggering the disorder.
Funding permitting, we hope to establish a new research project that would follow 1,000 children from birth to see what environmental factors might be linked to the development of various immune disorders.