Motherly Love Improves Children's Immune Systems

According to a new scientific investigation, it would appear that the love mothers show their children may actually be making the young ones more prepared in facing life. The work shows that kids who had warm, loving relationships with their mums were a lot less likely to exhibit large concentrations of inflammation biomarkers later on in life. These markers are an indicator on the health of the immune system, researchers say, and it would thus appear that mothers have an even higher influence on the overall health of their offspring than they know, LiveScience reports.

Inflammation is the first reaction that the body exhibits in case of an infection, or other sort of damage involving the action of the immune system. In a study researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) conducted on 53 adults, it was revealed that people who reported having warmer relationships with their mothers had an immune system that reacted better to infections. “We already know inflammation is a big determinant of disease, and now we're asking, what are the determinants of inflammation,” UCLA molecular biologist Steven Cole says. The expert was also a researcher on the new investigation.

All of the study participants were selected from households of low socioeconomics status (SES). About half of them reported having had loving mothers, with whom they had a tight, warm relationship, while the other half said that their mothers had been more distant. The group that experienced less motherly love had elevated levels of inflammation biomarkers. The UCLA team explains that these are molecules which indicate that genes are actively being turned into proteins. The issue here is that, in this particular case, these proteins promote inflammation. “Even bad circumstances can be overridden by good parenting. That lasts for decades and it gets all the way down to your genes,” Cole explains.

The group highlights that the proteins promoting inflammation are not always a bad thing. In fact, they are crucial when pathogens invade the body. They instruct immune system cells to ramp up their action, and make it easier for them to handle the danger. But excessive stress has been proven to be a factor that sometimes prevents these genes coding for inflammation proteins from being turned off. “These things are great for healing injured tissue, but they're not so good if they're on long term. You really want them to be on where and when you need them and off the rest of the time,” Cole says. Full details of the work appear in the May 18 online issue of the scientific journal Molecular Psychiatry.