ArticleScientific data2020
Systematic analysis of infectious disease outcomes by age shows lowest severity in school-age children.
Article in Scientific data, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 56 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
56 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 112 citations in OpenAlex.
- COVID-19 infection in children with blood cancer: A systematic review.Annals of hematology · 2025Pooled it
- Improving hand hygiene of young children with a digital intervention: a cluster-randomised controlled field trial.Scientific reports · 2024Trial
- Early-life infections and life course health and disease in the EU child cohort network.European journal of epidemiology · 2026Article
- DNA methylation and gene expression signatures for common childhood infections.Clinical epigenetics · 2026Article
- The problem with one-size-fits-all medicine: Biological sex and the aging immune system.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- CD8+ T cells and Humoral Immunity Influence the Development of Antibody-Dependent Enhancement: Implications for Vaccine Design.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The changing immune landscape of innate-like T cells and other innate cells throughout life.Immunology and cell biology · 2026Article
- Mapping of the country-wide prevalence of non-malarial febrile illnesses in areas with varying malaria transmission intensities in Mainland Tanzania.Gates open research · 2026Article
- The Pathology of Viral Infections.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2026Review
- Age is an intrinsic driver of inflammatory responses to malaria.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Short and long term suppression of host populations by novel pathogens.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Characteristics and risk factors for outcomes in patients withInfectious Disease Modelling · 2025Article
- Elderly individuals exhibit dysregulated monocyte responses to viral immune complexes compared to adults and children.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Social Determinants of Health: Analysis of the Effect of Socio-environmental Factors to Diseases, Injury-related DALYs, and Deaths based on WHO, ILO, and WB Data.Acta medica Philippina · 2025Article
- Sociodemographic and clinical profiles of patients receiving home care and the occurrence and management of healthcare-associated infections: a cross-sectional study.Sao Paulo medical journal = Revista paulista de medicina · 2025Observational
- Respiratory infections in the post-COVID-19 era: impact, prevalence, and clinical characteristics of bacterial and viral co-infections.Frontiers in medicine · 2025Article
- What goes up must come down: dynamics of type 1 interferon signaling across the lifespan.Frontiers in immunology · 2025Review
- A framework for ageing and health vulnerabilities in a changing climate.Nature climate change · 2024Article
- Perceived vulnerability to disease in pregnancy and parenthood and its impact on newborn health.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Quantifying the risk of spillover reduction programs for human health.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has ignited interest in age-specific manifestations of infection but surprisingly little is known about relative severity of infectious disease between the extremes of age. In a systematic analysis we identified 142 datasets with information on severity of disease by age for 32 different infectious diseases, 19 viral and 13 bacterial. For almost all infections, school-age children have the least severe disease, and severity starts to rise long before old age. Indeed, for many infections even young adults have more severe disease than children, and dengue was the only infection that was most severe in school-age children. Together with data on vaccine response in children and young adults, the findings suggest peak immune function is reached around 5-14 years of age. Relative immune senescence may begin much earlier than assumed, before accelerating in older age groups. This has major implications for understanding resilience to infection, optimal vaccine scheduling, and appropriate health protection policies across the life course.
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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.