Do Helicobacter pylori therapeutic vaccines need to be tailored to the age of the recipient?

Abstract

Helicobacter pylori infections typically commence during childhood and last for life. Freire de Melo and colleagues compared cytokine profiles in the stomachs of H. pylori-infected and H. pylori-uninfected children and adults from Brazil. They suggest that the immune effector response in infected children differs from infected adults, specifically that stomachs of infected children contained elevated regulatory T-cell markers and less IL-17 compared with adults. As vaccine-mediated protection against H. pylori is believed to involve IL-17 and to be inhibited by regulatory T cells, this raises the possibility that individual H. pylorivaccines may have different efficacies in children and adul..