Why some children may get strep throat more often than others
Tonsil tissue from kids with recurring infections have smaller key immune structures
For kids, getting strep throat again and again is a pain. It’s also a problem little understood by scientists. Now a study that analyzed kids’ tonsils hints at why such repeat infections may happen.
Children with recurrent strep infections had smaller immune structures crucial to the development of antibodies in their tonsils than kids who hadn’t had repeated infections, researchers found. The frequently sore-of-throat were also more susceptible to a protein, deployed by the bacteria that cause the infection, that disrupts the body’s immune response, the team reports online February 6 in Science Translational Medicine.