[Immunological mechanisms involved in pregnancy]

Pregnancy progresses through mechanisms that allow the embryo implantation and its development during gestation. Those mechanisms involve the immune cells that participate in the regulation of immune tolerance and response, as well as the protection conferred by Th2 cytokines and molecules expressed on trophoblast cells. Local factors expressed in the fetal interface as HLA-G, which inhibits the cytotoxicity of uterine natural killer cells and induces apoptosis of activated CD8 cells; transforming growth factor-beta, that induces tolerance, and uterine natural killer cells that are functionally different to the peripheral, as well as circulating progesterone and the glicodeline molecules that are important regulators of the immune response, also intervene in the process. From the conventional immunological point of view, pregnancy is a unique immune condition in which the fetus, semiallogenic, avoids being rejected immunologically by the mother, apparently by inducing a tolerance more than a sensitization