ArticleParasitology2013
Dances with worms: the ecological and evolutionary impacts of deworming on coinfecting pathogens.
Article in Parasitology, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Anthelmintic drugs for treating ascariasis.The Cochrane database of systematic reviews · 2020Pooled it
- Effect of Repeated Anthelminthic Treatment on Malaria in School Children in Kenya: A Randomized, Open-Label, Equivalence Trial.The Journal of infectious diseases · 2016Trial
- The impact of anthelmintic treatment intervention on malaria infection and anaemia in school and preschool children in Magu district, Tanzania: an open label randomised intervention trial.BMC infectious diseases · 2015Trial
- Helminth Infection, Gut Microbiome Alterations, and Their Impact on Pulmonary Tuberculosis Susceptibility.Journal of tropical medicine · 2026Review
- Experimental evolution of Plasmodium yoelii in single and helminth-coinfected mice.Malaria journal · 2025Article
- Helminth Coinfections Modulate Disease Dynamics and Vaccination Success in the Era of Emerging Infectious Diseases.Vaccines · 2025Review
- The impact of within-host coinfection interactions on between-host parasite transmission dynamics varies with spatial scale.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Scaling effects of temperature on parasitism from individuals to populations.The Journal of animal ecology · 2022Review
- Experimental parasite community perturbation reveals associations between Sin Nombre virus and gastrointestinal nematodes in a rodent reservoir host.Biology letters · 2020Article
- Modeling the Effects of Helminth Infection on the Transmission Dynamics of Mycobacterium tuberculosis under Optimal Control Strategies.Computational and mathematical methods in medicine · 2020Article
- Linking community assembly and structure across scales in a wild mouse parasite community.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Increased Prevalence of Cestode Infection Associated with History of Deworming among Primary School Children in Ethiopia.The American journal of tropical medicine and hygiene · 2019Article
- Associations between soil-transmitted helminthiasis and viral, bacterial, and protozoal enteroinfections: a cross-sectional study in rural Laos.Parasites & vectors · 2019Article
- Age affects antibody levels and anthelmintic treatment efficacy in a wild rodent.International journal for parasitology. Parasites and wildlife · 2019Article
- Opposite outcomes of coinfection at individual and population scales.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Evaluating the Effects of Ivermectin Treatment on Communities of Gastrointestinal Parasites in Translocated Woylies (Bettongia penicillata).EcoHealth · 2017Article
- Evidence for interspecific interactions in the ectoparasite infracommunity of a wild mammal.Parasites & vectors · 2016Article
- Why infectious disease research needs community ecology.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2015Review
- Interactions among urogenital, intestinal, skin, and oral infections in pregnant and lactating Panamanian Ngäbe women: a neglected public health challenge.The American journal of tropical medicine and hygiene · 2015Article
- Beyond mice and men: environmental change, immunity and infections in wild ungulates.Parasite immunology · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Parasitic helminths are ubiquitous in most host, including human, populations. Helminths often alter the likelihood of infection and disease progression of coinfecting microparasitic pathogens (viruses, bacteria, protozoa), and there is great interest in incorporating deworming into control programmes for many major diseases (e.g. HIV, tuberculosis, malaria). However, such calls are controversial; studies show the consequences of deworming for the severity and spread of pathogens to be highly variable. Hence, the benefits of deworming, although clear for reducing the morbidity due to helminth infection per se, are unclear regarding the outcome of coinfections and comorbidities. I develop a theoretical framework to explore how helminth coinfection with other pathogens affects host mortality and pathogen spread and evolution under different interspecific parasite interactions. In all cases the outcomes of coinfection are highly context-dependent, depending on the mechanism of helminth-pathogen interaction and the quantitative level of helminth infection, with the effects of deworming potentially switching from beneficial to detrimental depending on helminth burden. Such context-dependency may explain some of the variation in the benefits of deworming seen between studies, and highlights the need for obtaining a quantitative understanding of parasite interactions across realistic helminth infection ranges. However, despite this complexity, this framework reveals predictable patterns in the effects of helminths that may aid the development of more effective, integrated management strategies to combat pathogens in this coinfected world.
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Registered trials
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