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Vitamin A Deficiency Impairs Some Aspects of the Host Response to Influenza A Virus Infection in BALB/c Mice^1,2,3,

Charles B. Stephensen^*,,4, Sharon R. Blount^*, Trenton R. Schoeb and Jong Y. Park^*

^* Department of Public Health Sciences, School of Public Health Department of Comparative Medicine, Schools of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294

We examined the impact of vitamin A deficiency on the host response to an acute, viral infection of the respiratory tract by infecting BALB/c mice with a mouse-adapted strain of influenza A virus. Several indicators of the severity of infection were examined, including the rate of virus clearance from the lungs, the extent of inflammatory lesions, and percentage of survival. None of these was affected by vitamin A deficiency. Following the acute phase of infection, however, the regeneration of normal, respiratory epithelium was impaired and adenomatoid, metaplastic lesions developed within inflammatory foci in the lungs of deficient animals. The antibody response to infection was also characterized: the influenza A-specific immunoglobulin A (IgA) response in the respiratory tract was markedly decreased by vitamin A deficiency, but tracheal and lung lavage IgG titers were not affected. The serum IgM and IgG responses, and the serum hemagglutination-inhibition response, were also diminished by vitamin A deficiency. Decreased mucosal IgA titers and impaired regeneration of normal respiratory epithelium could impair recovery from a primary infection and increase susceptibility to opportunistic secondary infections.

KEY WORDS: • vitamin A deficiency • influenza A virus • metaplasia • immunoglobulin • mice

¹ Financial support was provided by the University of Alabama at Birmingham Clinical Nutrition Research Unit and NIH Grant no. CA-28103-10.

² Some of these data were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, April 1992, Anaheim, CA [Stephensen, C. B., Blount, S. R., Park, J. & Schoeb, T. R. (1992) Virus clearance and mortality are not affected by vitamin A deficiency during experimental influenza A virus infection of BALB/c mice. FASEB J. 6: A1662 (abs.)].

³ The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 USC section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.

⁴ To whom correspondence should be addressed.

Manuscript received 19 October 1992. Revision accepted 6 January 1993.

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