Back

Microbial and immune determinants of disease severity and death in pediatric pneumonia.

Hanze Villavicencio, K.; Tanes, C.; Malekshahi, C.; Cutillo, D.; Knoll, M. D.; Prosperi, C.; Kalaycioglu, M.; Harris, M.; Utz, P. J.; Mattei, L.; Beiting, D.

2026-07-04 pediatrics
10.64898/2026.07.02.26356561 medRxiv
Show abstract

Pneumonia is a leading cause of death globally and disproportionately affects children in lower- and middle-income countries. To explore microbial and immune correlates of disease and death, we performed metagenomic sequencing of upper respiratory tract (URT) microbiome in 309 children in Mali with pneumonia and 150 age- and season- and site-matched controls. We show that the URT microbiome matures throughout early life and is influenced by breastfeeding. URT microbiome maturation was disrupted during pneumonia resulting in loss of commensal species and expansion of pathobionts, which was linked to disease severity and death. Analysis of serum antibody levels revealed that low levels of passively acquired antibody from mothers, deficient antibody responses to RSV, and persistent autoantibody to cytokines were associated with pneumonia mortality in an age-dependent manner. These findings underscore the complex nature of pneumonia and identify microbial and immune factors for risk stratification and therapeutic interventions in pediatric pneumonia.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.