IMMUNITY: The secret to old age
December 09, 2019 • 1 min read
-- Living to a ripe old age is all in the T-cells
Supercentenarians, people who live to be 110 years old or more, are likely to be packing more T-cells than their less active younger peers.
T-cells – workhorses of the immune system – are critical to mounting a response and attacking infected cells.
Researchers in Japan tested supercentenarians and compared their T-cell levels with a group decades younger, aged 50-to-80 years.
Using single-cell RNA sequencing technology, scientists found a much higher proportion of a subset of CD4 T-cells in the group aged 110 years and older (25% of total T-cells) compared to the younger group (2.8%)
CD4 T-cells, which typically have “helper” status, possess cytotoxic features, meaning they kill invaders.
There are an estimated 300 to 450 supercentenarians worldwide, according to the Gerontology Research Group. Japan, a generally long-lived society, had 146 supercentenarians in 2015, according to Japanese census data cited in the research.
Piero Carninci, an author of the study, explained that CD4 T-cells possibly increased during aging of patients while fighting viruses/cancer.
Study findings raise million-dollar questions: can we get tested for CD4 CTLs? And how does one boost their levels of CD4 CTLs?