ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2009
Mothers produce less aggressive sons with altered immunity when there is a threat of disease during pregnancy.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 57 citations in OpenAlex.
- No Effect in Plasma Corticosterone Levels After Observation of Diseased Conspecifics.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
- Socioecological predictors of immune defences in wild spotted hyenas.Functional ecology · 2016Article
- Natural variation in brain gene expression profiles of aggressive and nonaggressive individual sticklebacks.Behaviour · 2016Article
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- Article
- Proactive strategies to avoid infectious disease.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Article
- Infection before pregnancy affects immunity and response to social challenge in the next generation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Article
- Zoonotic and non-zoonotic diseases in relation to human personality and societal values: support for the parasite-stress model.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior · 2010Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Maternal experience before and during pregnancy is known to play a key role in offspring development. However, the influence of social cues about disease in the maternal environment has not been explored. We indirectly exposed pregnant mice to infected neighbours by housing them next to non-contagious conspecifics infected with Babesia microti. We examined the effect of this indirect immunological exposure on both the females and their adult offspring. Exposed females had higher levels of serum corticosterone and increased kidney growth compared with those with uninfected neighbours. These exposed females subsequently produced offspring that as adults showed an accelerated immune response to B. microti and less aggression in social groups. We suggest that ambient information regarding disease is used adaptively to maximize offspring survival and reproductive success in a challenging environment. Our results shed light on the impact of social information and maternal effects on life histories, and have important consequences for our understanding of epidemiology and individual disease susceptibility in humans and other animals. They also lead us to question the suitability of some laboratory housing conditions during experimental procedures, which may impact negatively upon both animal welfare and the validity of animal science.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.