Lineage-specific protection and immune imprinting shape the age distributions of influenza B cases

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Marcos C Vieira, University of Chicago; Celeste M Donato, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute; Philip Arevalo, University of Chicago; Guus F Rimmelzwaan, University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover; Timothy Wood, Institute of Environmental Science and Research; Liza Lopez, Institute of Environmental Science and Research; Sue Q Huang, Institute of Environmental Science and Research; Vijaykrishna Dhanasekaran, Monash University; Katharina Koelle, Emory University; Sarah Cobey, University of Chicago
• Language: English
• Date: 2021-07-14
• Publisher: NATURE RESEARCH
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: © The Author(s) 2021
• License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24566-y
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 1
• Start Page: 4313
• End Page: 4313
• Grant/Funding Information: The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding sources.; P.A. was supported by an NRSA Fellowship F32AI145177-01 by the National Institutes of Health.; This project has been funded in part with Federal funds from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services under grant DP2 AI117921 and CEIRS Contract number HHSN272201400005C awarded to S.C.; M.V. was supported by a William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship by the University of Chicago.; K.K. was supported by MIDAS CIDID Center of Excellence (U54-GM111274), V.D. was supported by NIH CEIRS Contract number HHSN272201400006C, and C.D. was supported by an Early Career Fellowship (1113269) from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council.
• Keywords: UNITED-STATES; Science & Technology; VACCINE EFFECTIVENESS; EPIDEMIOLOGY; COMMUNITY; Multidisciplinary Sciences; PERSISTENCE; SURVEILLANCE; Science & Technology - Other Topics; LABORATORY-CONFIRMED INFLUENZA; ANTIBODIES; PANDEMIC INFLUENZA; VIRUS-INFECTIONS
• Research Categories: Biology, Ecology; Environmental Sciences; Biology, Microbiology

Abstract

How a history of influenza virus infections contributes to protection is not fully understood, but such protection might explain the contrasting age distributions of cases of the two lineages of influenza B, B/Victoria and B/Yamagata. Fitting a statistical model to those distributions using surveillance data from New Zealand, we found they could be explained by historical changes in lineage frequencies combined with cross-protection between strains of the same lineage. We found additional protection against B/Yamagata in people for whom it was their first influenza B infection, similar to the immune imprinting observed in influenza A. While the data were not informative about B/Victoria imprinting, B/Yamagata imprinting could explain the fewer B/Yamagata than B/Victoria cases in cohorts born in the 1990s and the bimodal age distribution of B/Yamagata cases. Longitudinal studies can test if these forms of protection inferred from historical data extend to more recent strains and other populations.