Impactos da obesidade no desenvolvimento de malária grave murina causada por Plasmodium berghei - ANKA: avaliação de parâmetros parasitológicos e imunológicos

Abstract

Obesity is a public heaith concern currentiy affecting worldwide, aithough there are many studies on the impact of obesity on the immune system, the various aspects of the association between obesity and infection is seidom reported. The incidence of obesity is increasing in the developing countries, and it is very important to study the role of obesity in the immune response to pathogens, especially infectious diseases such as maiaria. Obesity is characterized by a iow-grade, systemic, chronic infiammation and it is believed that the complicated manifestations of maiaria, as severe maiaria, can be the result of an exaggerated inflammatory response caused by sequestration of infected erythrocytes to endothelial vesseis of vital organs such as brain and lung. So infiammation in obesity may alter the course of infection of Plasmodium berguei ANKA, parasites that cause cerebral maiaria in mice. In this work, we investigated the influence of obesity on the immune response to infection by Plasmodium berguei ANKA. For this, mate C57BL/6 mice aged 4 to 6 weeks were used, fed by a high fat diet with 60% of kilocalories from lipid, for 12 weeks. After this period the animais were infected with the strain ANKA of Plasmodium berguei. There was an increase in body weight as well as the perigonadal fat in animais fed with the high fat diet, without increasing the food intake, from the second week of dieting. The resistance to the deveiopment of severe maiaria was observed in the obese animais, beside of control the parasitemia, oniy those animais survived the infection for 25 days post challenge, without any clinicai symptoms of the disease, unlike infected non obese, who died after eight days of infection. Differences were observed in the cell profile of infected obese animais compared to infected controls, suggesting that prior infiammation in obese animais may have infiuenced the course of infection. Thus, the resuits indicate that changes in the immune response of obese mice can protect against the deveiopment of severe maiaria.