As a person ages, systemic and chronic inflammation promotes vulnerability to diseases like cancer, heart attacks, strokes, neurodegeneration, and autoimmunity.
‘Immune system ‘clock’ (Inflammatory-aging clock) has been developed by scientists to help predict illness and mortality related to especially cardiovascular problems in an individual. This helps in treating various disorders early for effective quality of life.
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The Immune Clock
The study enrolled 1,001 healthy people ages 8-96 between 2009 and 2016 for the 1000 Immunomes Project. The participants had their blood samples drawn for a barrage of analytical procedures determining levels of immune-signaling proteins called cytokines, the activation status of numerous immune-cell types in responses to various stimuli, and the overall activity levels of thousands of genes in each of those cells.
Using the artificial intelligence, the scientists compiled these data to refer to as an inflammatory clock – the strongest predictors of inflammatory age and aging-related diseases.
The study was confirmed in an ongoing study of exceptionally long-lived people in Bologna, Italy as they compared the inflammatory ages of these older people. The effect of inflammatory age on mortality was again validated through another study – Framingham Study (tracks health outcomes in thousands of individuals since 1948).
The Inflammatory Drive
It was found that a specific substance – CXCL9 (a cytokine secreted by certain immune cells to attract other immune cells to a site of infection) in the blood contributed more powerfully than any other clock component to the inflammatory-age score. On average, it was shown to rise dramatically after the age of 60 and also revealed reliable data on the risk of cardiovascular deterioration.
“Our inflammatory aging clock’s ability to detect subclinical accelerated cardiovascular aging hints at its potential clinical impact. All disorders are treated best when they’re treated early,” says, Furman.
Source: Medindia
