How To Boost Immunity Of Old People
Team of English researchers from the Babraham Institute in Cambridge managed to improve exhausted immune system of older people with a cream used to treat genital warts.
Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay
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As we get older, we start to break down. Starting with how strong our muscles are and ending with the power of our immune system. Even simple diseases like the cold can suddenly bring us down.
Doctor Michelle Linterman is an internationally recognized immunologist that specializes in the “laziness” of cellular and molecular mechanisms. A few days they had an article published in the journal eLife that you should certainly hear about.
The Basics Of The Immune System
But, before we get to the crux of the matter we should talk a bit about how it works inside the body when everything works. Whether it comes to vaccines or an attack of living viruses – the creation of antibodies decided how well (or bad) we do. Cells that are responsible for this are using something warriors might call “concentrating” and immunologists call it the germinal center reaction.
These are places inside your body where a certain type of white blood cells called B cells or B lymphocytes proliferate, differentiate and mutate. These processes lead to the creation of Memory B cells. This sub-set of white blood cells have a special kind of memory that decides in the future whether we will become immune to a disease or whether we can catch it again. While I have obviously oversimplified the whole process as in reality there are many more types of cells helping in the process for today all we need to remember is that another type of specialized white blood cells called T cells helps in the germinal center reaction.
Until recently we only differentiated B and T cells. But as we are discovering small and delicate structures on the surface of the cell membranes the number of types of cells is constantly growing. So, to make it at least a bit easier the scientists decided to give different types of cells a second name. For us, we need to learn about a sub-type of T cells called CD4+ that are also known and T Follicular Helper Cells. Their job description is the guard to the response of B lymphocytes. To do that they give our orders that make only the B cell that can fight to a certain virus survive while the rest die. And we do need them to successfully fight battles against diseases. Sadly, with age, we tend to have less and less of them.
A Creamy Hope
Yet, there is hope! The scientists say that they have found a way of how to increase the numbers of T Follicular Helper Cells. So far, they can do it only in mice but that shouldn't be a big problem as the immune systems among mammals are incredibly similar. Even mice have their seniors and they too have too few of the T Follicular Helper Cells. The only difference is that mice retire when they are about two years old. By that time they have five times less follicular helper cells and that makes much less capable of becoming immune or vaccinated against diseases. But when the researchers rubbed them with a cream that included imiquimod when they were immunizing their mice the number of T Follicular Helper Cells created increased. And with that, the number of created protective immunoglobulins increased as well.
As there is a good chance that the majority of you never heard of imiquimod – this is a substance we use when we catch a really nasty little big called Papillomaviruses. These like to live in our intimate areas and in humans, we generally just call them HPV and often they cause this unpleasant thing called genital warts.
But back to the positive side of things. The increased production of antibodies proves the hypothesis that bad activation of T cells is the true reason behind why our immune systems lose power as we age. So, maybe we will soon see old people rubbing themselves with genital wart cream just to make themselves more resistant to the flu.
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