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.
