Long-term intrinsic cycling in human life-course antibody responses to influenza A(H3N2)

Over a life-course, human adaptive immunity to antigenically mutable pathogens exhibits competitive and facilitative interactions. We hypothesize that such interactions may lead to cyclic dynamics in immune responses over a lifetime. Here, we demonstrated a long-term periodicity (about 24 years) in individual antibody responses, by analyzing hemagglutination inhibition titers against 21 historical influenza A(H3N2) strains spanning 47 years from a cohort in Guangzhou, China. The reported cycles were robust to analytic and sampling approaches. Simulations suggested that individual-level cross-reaction between antigenically similar strains likely explain the reported cycle. We showed that the reported cycles are predictable at both individual and birth-cohort level and that cohorts show a diversity of phases of these cycles. Phase of cycle was associated with the risk of response to circulating strains, after accounting for age and pre-existing titers of the circulating strains. Our findings reveal the existence of long-term periodicities in individual antibody responses to A(H3N2). We hypothesize that these cycles are driven by pre-existing antibody responses blunting responses to antigenically similar pathogens (by preventing infection and/or robust antibody responses upon infection), leading to reductions in antigen specific responses over time until individual’s increasing risk leads to an infection with an antigenically distant enough virus to generate a robust immune response. These findings could help disentangle cohort-effects from individual-level exposure histories, improve our understanding of observed heterogeneous antibody responses to immunizations, and inform targeted vaccine strategy.