Fight Aging! Newsletter, November 20th 2017

This study cohort is a healthy subset of the EpiPath cohort, excluding all participants with acute or chronic diseases. With a mediation analysis we examined whether CMV titers may account for immunosenescence observed in ELA. In this study, we have shown that ELA is associated with higher levels of T cell senescence in healthy participants. Not only did we find a higher number of senescent cells (CD57+), these cells also expressed higher levels of CD57, a cell surface marker for senescence, and were more cytotoxic in ELA compared to controls. Control participants with high CMV titers showed a higher number of senescent cells, compared to controls with low titers. Importantly, we found that the effect of ELA on immunosenescence was associated with CMV infection specifically, rather than being the consequence of continued reactivation of latent viruses in general. Our findings have important implications for this literature on senescence in ELA. Most evidence for accelerated immunosenescence in ELA comes from telomere length, but none of these studies have accounted for CMV infections. Our results suggest that the association between ELA and shorter telomeres - or immunosenescence in general - may have been largely mediated by CMV infection. First of all, because there is a clear link between CMV infection and immunosenescence. CMV infection is related to expanding populations of specific memory T cells, and a shrinking population of naïve T cells, similar to wh...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs