People Living Over 100 Years Own Immunity for Exceptional Longevity

New cell type-specific compositional and transcriptional changes unique to centenarians (people who are 100 years old or older) reflect the protective nature of their immunity successfully adapted to a history of sickness allowing for exceptional Longevity. One of the defining characteristics of aging is a decline in the proper functioning of the immune system but a new study published in the journal EBioMedicine show that Centenarians experience delays in age-related diseases and mortality, suggesting their immune systems remain functional into extreme old age.

There are approximately 30 trillion cells in the human body and our health is predicated on them properly interacting with and supporting each other, with the immune system playing a particularly pivotal role. New data supports the hypothesis that centenarians have protective factors that enable them to recover from disease and reach extremely old ages.

What is the Key to Living Longer? New Study Suggests Hidden Secret in Immunity

To identify immune-specific patterns of aging and extreme human longevity, researchers performed single-cell sequencing on peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs)—a broad category of immune cells circulating in the blood taken from seven centenarians enrolled in the New England Centenarian Study.

Later, they integrated this dataset with two publicly available single‐cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) datasets of PBMCs to investigate compositional and transcriptional changes in circulating immune profiles across the human lifespan and extreme old age.

Lastly, they applied advanced computational techniques to analyze the combined data, to evaluate how the cell type composition (the proportion of different cell types) and activity change as a function of age, and whether centenarians manifest profiles capturing or escaping the expected age progression.

The immune profiles observed in the centenarians confirm a long history of exposure to infections and their capacity to recover from them and provide support to the hypothesis that centenarians are enriched for protective factors that increase their ability to recover from infections.

Researchers believe these findings provide a foundation to investigate mechanisms of immune resilience likely contributing to extreme longevity as a target for healthy aging therapeutics. Centenarians, and their exceptional longevity, provide a ‘blueprint’ for how we might live more productive, healthful lives. They also hope to continue to learn everything we can about resilience against disease and the extension of one’s health span.

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Source-Eurekalert