Fight Aging!

The open access paper referenced here expands the picture of cytomegalovirus and the aging immune system with additional data. Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is a common herpesvirus present in near everyone by the time old age rolls around. In the majority of people it presents no symptoms, but it is apparently an important factor in the age-related decline of the immune system. Like all herpesviruses it cannot be effectively cleared from the body, and over the years the immune system devotes ever more of its limited resources to uselessly fighting it. An old immune system contains legions focused on cytomegalovirus and all too few cells capable of responding to other pathogens. This is one of the contributing causes of immunosenescence, the progressive failure of the immune system with age.

The best approaches to solving this problem actually involve expanding the population of useful immune cells rather than getting rid of cytomegalovirus. Clearing it doesn't fix the damage done: the specialized cells are already specialized. So possible treatments might involve delivering infusions of immune cells grown from the patient's own stem cells, selectively destroying cytomegalovirus-targeted immune cells to free up space for replacement with new immune cells, or restoring the thymus to increase the pace at which new immune cells are created.

Cytomegalovirus infection has been associated with a variety of health problems in elderly people and there is increasing interest in the mechanisms that underlie this association. A key determinant in this regard will be greater understanding of the balance of the viral load and the host immune response during healthy ageing. In this study we report, for the first time, that the level of cytomegalovirus viral load within the blood increased markedly in elderly people. A novel feature of our work was the use of digital droplet PCR (ddPCR) to provide an accurate quantitative measure of latent viral DNA. Previous methods for detection of CMV generally relied on nested PCR techniques, which made quantification challenging and also raised substantial problems with reproducibility.

Our work was performed using DNA isolated from monocytes, which are established as the most important haemopoietic site of viral latency. The first interesting finding was the observation that CMV was detectable in only a minority of donors, as 64% of people remained negative by ddPCR despite the presence of chronic infection as confirmed by CMV-specific IgG positivity. Indeed, in younger people below the age of 50 years, the detection of CMV load in the blood was uncommon, being observed in only 13% of donors tested. The lower limit of detection provided by ddPCR in our assay was for a single copy of virus within the total reaction volume and as such a negative result indicated absent or extremely low levels of virus. This low level carriage may reflect a lower intrinsic probability of viral reactivation in younger donors but is perhaps more likely to reflect the consequence of effective immune surveillance of viral replication in younger individuals.

The frequency of viral detection increased markedly with each decade above the age of 50 years to 37.5% and 50% and finally became positive in every donor who was older than 70. Interestingly the amount of viral DNA detected within the blood also increased substantially with age with a 29 fold increase observed between donors aged less than 70 and those over this age. The use of nested PCR also detected viral DNA within the majority of healthy elderly donors. These data indicate that a gradual impairment in the ability to control CMV load within blood starts around the age of 50 years and then deteriorates markedly beyond the age of 70. In conclusion, these data reveal the delicate balance that has evolved between chronic CMV infection and the host immune response and indicate that this symbiosis can break down during ageing, where an increase in CMV viral load occurs as the attritional effects of chronic surveillance and the impact of immune senescence become more apparent. It is likely that increased understanding of the clinical importance of chronic viral infection on human health will become an important health consideration in future years.

Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12979-015-0056-6