Active and passive protein sensitization in utero.

Abstract

It seemed probable to one of us that protein sensitivity in certain cases of early infancy might have some relationship to prenatal conditions.

Time does not permit our going into a detailed discussion of our hypothesis, nor can we enter into the clinical considerations, nor historical background for our work. We would merely like to present certain investigations on guinea pigs, which may have a bearing on this problem.

There has been a small but clearly defined amount of work by Rosenau and Anderson, 1 Anderson, 2 Gay and Southard, 3 Wells, 4 and others, on the passive transfer of antibodies from mother to offspring.

In the study of 29 guinea pig families, in which the mothers had been injected with normal horse serum long before conception, we induced acute anaphylactic death in the offspring born of these mothers, by an injection of normal horse serum within the first twenty-four hours to a few days after birth, thus corroborating the work of others.

We have also shown this passive sensitivity of the offspring to persist as a rule for 78 days, and in one instance, for 118 days. Thus for the present, we may assume that passive sensitization from mother to offspring generally lasts for about 2 1/2 months, but may persist for even longer than 4 months.

Up to the present state of our investigation, we have shown this transfer to pass successively into the offspring of the second, third, and fourth litters, the mothers having received a single injection of horse serum before the first confinement.

In 15 families, in which the mothers were sensitized during pregnancy, the offspring, as in the former cases, showed sensitization at birth. We have not as yet demonstrated the influence that the antigen might have on the duration of sensitization in these off spring.