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Review
. 2024 Apr 11;12(4):775.
doi: 10.3390/microorganisms12040775.

The Impact of Immune System Aging on Infectious Diseases

Eugenia Quiros-Roldan  1 , Alessandra Sottini  2 , Pier Giorgio Natali  3 , Luisa Imberti  4
Affiliations
Review

The Impact of Immune System Aging on Infectious Diseases

Eugenia Quiros-Roldan et al. Microorganisms. .

Abstract

Immune system aging is becoming a field of increasing public health interest because of prolonged life expectancy, which is not paralleled by an increase in health expectancy. As age progresses, innate and adaptive immune systems undergo changes, which are defined, respectively, as inflammaging and immune senescence. A wealth of available data demonstrates that these two conditions are closely linked, leading to a greater vulnerability of elderly subjects to viral, bacterial, and opportunistic infections as well as lower post-vaccination protection. To face this novel scenario, an in-depth assessment of the immune players involved in this changing epidemiology is demanded regarding the individual and concerted involvement of immune cells and mediators within endogenous and exogenous factors and co-morbidities. This review provides an overall updated description of the changes affecting the aging immune system, which may be of help in understanding the underlying mechanisms associated with the main age-associated infectious diseases.

Keywords: aging; immunosenescence; infectious disease; inflammaging; vaccination.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Schematic representation of the principal age-related diseases.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Main qualitative age-associated changes in the cells of innate and adaptive immunity [13,28,29,32,35,37,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,49,50,51].
Figure 3
Figure 3
Overview of the principal organs, immune components, and targets of omics profiling technologies that can be used to characterize the age-related modification of the immune system at population and single-cell levels. ATAC-seq: assay for transposase-accessible chromatin using sequencing; BS-Seq: bisulfite sequencing; ChiP-seq chromatin immunoprecipitation assays combined with DNA sequencing; scMS: single-cell metabolomics; scRNA-seq: single-cell RNA sequencing; cyTOF: cytometry by time of flight; smFISH: single-molecule fluorescence in situ hybridization; and MS-PTM-MS: tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) of posttranslational modifications (PTM).
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Grants and funding

This research received funding from 2nd bando Sanità; PNRR-Salute; Ministero della Salute, Italia.