Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 206

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 45 of the 45 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Microbial ‘old friends’, immunoregulation and socioeconomic status

Open access
Rook, G A W, Raison, C L, Lowry, C A·2014·Clinical and Experimental Immunology

Abstract

Summary: The immune system evolved to require input from at least three sources that we collectively term the ‘old friends’: (i) the commensal microbiotas transmitted by mothers and other family members; (ii) organisms from the natural environment that modulate and diversify the commensal microbiotas; and (iii) the ‘old’ infections that could persist in small isolated hunter-gatherer groups as relatively harmless subclinical infections or carrier states. These categories of organism had to be tolerated and co-evolved roles in the development and regulation of the immune system. By contrast, the ‘crowd infections’ (such as childhood virus infections) evolved later, when urbanization led to large communities. They did not evolve immunoregulatory roles because they either killed the host or induced solid immunity, and could not persist in hunter-gatherer groups. Because the western lifestyle and medical practice deplete the ‘old’ infections (for example helminths), immunoregulatory disorders have increased, and the immune system has become more dependent upon microbiotas and the natural environment. However, urbanization maintains exposure to the crowd infections that lack immunoregulatory roles, while accelerating loss of exposure to the natural environment. This effect is most pronounced in individuals of low socioeconomic status (SES) who lack rural second homes and rural holidays. Interestingly, large epidemiological studies indicate that the health benefits of living close to green spaces are most pronounced for individuals of low SES. Here we discuss the immunoregulatory role of the natural environment, and how this may interact with, and modulate, the proinflammatory effects of psychosocial stressors in low SES individuals.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/cei.12269

Cites

45 of 45 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 45 references

Cited by

See all 206

Metadata

Authors
Rook, G. A. W., Raison, C. L., & Lowry, C. A.
Venue
Clinical and Experimental Immunology
Published
2014-06-09
Volume
177
Issue
1
Pages
1-12
ISSN
  • 0009-9104 (ISSN-L)
  • 1365-2249
OpenAlex
W1527520722
Cited by
206
References
45
FWCI
7.67
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
hybrid

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Microbial ‘old friends’, immunoregulation and socioeconomic status. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/cei.12269
The paper
Rook, G. A. W., Raison, C. L., & Lowry, C. A. (2014). Microbial ‘old friends’, immunoregulation and socioeconomic status. Clinical and Experimental Immunology. https://doi.org/10.1111/cei.12269

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.