{"doi":"10.1128/spectrum.00010-23","title":"Obesity Is Associated with an Impaired Baseline Repertoire of Anti-Influenza Virus Antibodies","abstract":"Obesity is associated with increased morbidity and mortality from influenza and SARS-CoV-2 infection. While vaccination is the most effective strategy for preventing influenza virus infection, our previous studies showed that influenza vaccines fail to provide optimal protection in obese individuals despite reaching canonical correlates of protection. Here, we show that obesity may impair immune history in humans and cannot be overcome by seasonal vaccination, especially in younger individuals with decreased lifetime exposure to infections and seasonal vaccines. Low baseline immune history is associated with decreased protective antibody responses. Obesity potentially handicaps overall responses to vaccination, biasing it toward responses to linear epitopes, which may reduce protective capacity. Taken together, our data suggest that young obese individuals are at an increased risk of reduced protection by vaccination, likely due to altered immune history biased toward nonprotective antibody responses. Given the worldwide obesity epidemic coupled with seasonal respiratory virus infections and the inevitable next pandemic, it is imperative that we understand and improve vaccine efficacy in this high-risk population. The design, development, and usage of vaccines for and in obese individuals may need critical evaluation, and immune history should be considered an alternate correlate of protection in future vaccine clinical trials.","journal":"Microbiology Spectrum","year":2023,"id":352526,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":8,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9455,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":943405,"name":"Lilach M. Friedman","orcid":"0000-0002-5399-7356","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":366888,"name":"Erik A. Karlsson","orcid":"0000-0001-6004-5671","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":558564,"name":"Liel Cohen-Lavi","orcid":"0000-0001-6909-4779","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1098387,"name":"Anat Burkovitz","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":242112,"name":"Stacey Schultz‐Cherry","orcid":"0000-0002-2021-727X","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":442432,"name":"Terry L. Noah","orcid":"0000-0002-5134-3164","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":611786,"name":"Samuel S. Weir","orcid":null,"position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1098023,"name":"Lester M. Shulman","orcid":"0000-0002-6385-894X","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":379312,"name":"Melinda A. Beck","orcid":"0000-0003-4871-6828","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":558566,"name":"Tomer Hertz","orcid":"0000-0002-0561-1578","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":943402,"name":"Marwa Abd Alhadi","orcid":"0000-0002-4713-9347","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":50,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:12:50.107998Z","pmid":"37098954","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}