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0:00
Hello, my name is
Professor Janet Lord
from the Institute of
Inflammation and Ageing
at the University of Birmingham.
In today's talk,
I'm going to be talking
about the impact of
advancing age on
the immune system
which has been termed
Immunesenescence.
0:17
What I'm going to cover is
the evidence that
age does compromise
your immune function and
then going to work through
the age-related changes to
the two arms of
the immune system,
the innate immune system and
the adaptive immune system.
Moving on then to how this
influences health generally
and may have an impact beyond
the immune system itself
and finally finishing on ways
that are coming to light
to overcome immune
system ageing.
0:48
We're going to be thinking about
what it is that your
immune system does
and the criteria we might have
for saying that your
immune system ages.
The primary job of
your immune system
is to detect and kill pathogens.
These are viruses,
bacteria, parasites.
It also has to be able
to develop memory
so that when it experiences
that pathogen again,
it responds more quickly
and more precisely.
It has a third function
which is to detect and
kill transformed cells in
the early stages of cancer.
It also, we now know,
removes senescent cells
and it can also remove cells
that have got any damage.
Finally, it has to be
able to detect non-self,
pathogens and cancers, and
delineate them from self
so that we don't have
auto-immune reactions.
This is immune tolerance.
I'll now work through some
of the evidence that shows
these functions are compromised
with advancing age.
