Low mannose-binding lectin (MBL) levels in neonates with pneumonia and sepsis

Low-mannose-binding lectin levels in susceptibility to neonatal sepsis in preterm neonates with fetal inflammatory response syndrome

“…Limited study about MBL levels in newborn period have been published [4,8,9,11,17,18,20,21,25]. It would appear from subsequent publications that MBL levels are lower in preterm than term neonates and is related to gestational age rather than birth weight [17,20,21].…”

“…Newborn with culture confirmed sepsis have lowest levels of MBL levels in our study. Comparison of studies on MBL and neonatal sepsis is also hampered by different sepsis definitions used in different studies [4,8,9,11,21]. Current studies highlighted that MBL was influencing the rate of bacteremia and indicates that MBL is likely to be influencing host bactericidal properties, probably through activation of complement pathways [22].…”

“…They showed also low MBL levels at birth are associated with an increased risk of hospitalacquired sepsis in NICU. Frakking et al [8] showed that low MBL levels at birth are associated with an increased risk of early-onset sepsis, culture-proven sepsis and pneumonia during the first month of life.…”

“…Mannose-binding lectin (MBL) is one of the best studied human collectins and is an acute phase protein primarily produced by the liver [5][6][7]. During childhood, low MBL levels are associated with recurrent infections, as well as sepsis and systemic inflammatory response syndrome in toddlers and newborns [4,[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Contradictory and restricted results were reported about MBL levels in newborns especially prematures [17][18][19][20][21].…”

Innate immunity in human newborn infants: prematurity means more than immaturity

“…In addition to genetic determinants of MBL levels, preterm infants are relatively MBL deficient per se, with serum levels rising with gestational and postnatal age [36,37]. Furthermore, reduced plasma levels of MBL, particularly those less than 0.5 mg/ml (normal adult range ¼ 1-5 mg/ml) in infants of 528 week GA and/or a BW of 51000 g, significantly increase the risk of early-and late-onset neonatal sepsis as well as neonatal pneumonia and also prolong the required duration of antibiotic therapy [36,38,39].…”