Journal article
Lower proportion of naive peripheral CD8 T cells and an unopposed pro-inflammatory response to human Cytomegalovirus proteins in vitro are associated with longer survival in very elderly people
E Derhovanessian, AB Maier, K Hahnel, H Zelba, AJM De Craen, H Roelofs, EP Slagboom, RGJ Westendorp, G Pawelec
Age | SPRINGER | Published : 2013
Abstract
The low percentages of naive T cells commonly observed in elderly people are thought to be causally associated with mortality, primarily from infectious disease, and are taken as a hallmark of "immunosenescence". Whether low levels of naive cells actually do associate with mortality has, however, not been tested in longitudinal studies. Here, we present correlations between peripheral T-cell phenotypes and 8-year survival in individuals from the population-based prospective Leiden 85-plus Study. Counter-intuitively, we found that a lower frequency of naive CD8+ T cells (characterized as CD45RA+CCR7+CD27+CD28+) at baseline (>88 years) correlated with significantly better survival, while there..
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Awarded by Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport
Funding Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Prof. Hans-Peter Pircher (University of Freiburg) for providing the anti-KRLG1 antibody and Lilly Oettinger for antibody titration and flow cytometry quality controls. This work was supported by the European Commission (FP6 036894, "LifeSpan"; FP7 259679 "IDEAL"), DFG-PA 361/14-1, and the BMBF project "Gerontoshield" (0315890F). The Leiden 85+ study was funded by the Program Translational Research of the Netherlands organization for health research and development, the Leiden University Fund, and by an unrestricted grant from the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (ZonMw), the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports, and the Netherlands Genomics Initiative/Netherlands Organization for scientific research [NGI/NWO; 05040202 and 050-060-810 Netherlands Consortium for Healthy Aging (NCHA)].