The Future of Vaccination in the Old Must Involve Reversal of Immunosenescence

Robust modern forms of vaccination that were developed in the 20th century remain one of the most important forms of medical technology. Infectious diseases are not going away any time soon, and continue to cause a sizable fraction of human mortality, even though that fraction is much reduced in our era. Unfortunately, effective vaccination depends on an effective immune system, and thus vaccines tend to perform increasingly poorly with advancing age. As we age our immune system becomes ever less capable, a decline into immunosenescence caused by a range of contributing processes: involution of the thymus, where T cells of the adaptive immune system mature; a growing presence of senescent, exhausted, and malfunctioning immune cells; a shift in cell populations of the bone marrow to produce more myeloid and fewer lymphoid cells; and so forth. As today's open access paper points out, the approach to improving vaccination in the old has long been to find ways to work around the growing incapacity of the aged immune system. Developing better adjuvants to vaccines, for example. This produces only incremental gains. The yearly toll of influenza deaths is much larger than the estimates of prevented deaths due to widespread vaccination. For the 2022-2023 season those numbers show 21,000 estimated deaths versus 3,600 estimated prevented deaths. Most of those deaths are old people, not only less able to defend against an infectious pathogen, but also less able to benefit from va...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs