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Changes in innate and adaptive immunity during human ageing 1

Part 1 of 2
Published on October 16, 2022   36 min

Other Talks in the Series: The Immune System - Key Concepts and Questions

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0:00
Hello and welcome. My name is Dr. Roel De Maeyer. I'm a research fellow at University College London, Division of Medicine. I work in the immune senescence and ageing group there. Today, I'll be talking to you about ageing and immunity to explain, hopefully, what happens to our immune system as we get older.
0:19
One of the key questions I like to always start off with is whether or not ageing is a disease? It's quite a polarising question. I think certainly in academic terms, some people are saying, well, ageing actually fits all the disease criteria for the International Classification of Diseases, and so we should think about ageing as such. On the other hand, we have people who are saying actually that's completely wrong. There's not even any such thing as ageing potentially, we shouldn't be thinking about it in terms of a biological process like that. This debate quite a while ago was interesting and popular to lay people that even the independent was talking about why ageing could be considered a disease.
0:55
Now, personally, we'll talk about as we go along, we can see that we now live twice as long as we did 100 years ago. This graph very nicely shows the world in general, but specifically, I guess in wealthier countries like the United Kingdom, or regions like Europe, life expectancy is hovering around 80 years now. Whereas, in the 18/1900s that was much lower at 40 years. We really are living much longer now than we used to. This is obviously creating new challenges in healthcare and social support that we have to deal with. I think talking about ageing is very important. It's very topical. Stats are indicating that in about 2050 there will be a lot of people over the age of 60. That's just something that we have to be aware of and we have to think about.
1:40
Really the way the academic community has been thinking about this is trying to maybe classify ageing as a biological process a little bit. The image on this slide here is from a review written in 2013. A little bit old now. But this is a group of people that came together to decide, what can we really say about ageing in a biological context? They came up with these hallmarks of ageing. There are nine different categories. Cellular function, metabolic function, just to say, if these processes are affected then we're talking about ageing.

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Changes in innate and adaptive immunity during human ageing 1

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