Breaking news | Delayed immune response can be fatal to COVID-19 for older adults

A new study could delay the immune response of older people to COVID-19 by three days compared to that of young adults, which may explain why the death toll in the age group is so high. not.

The immune system begins to collapse with age. This is a phenomenon called immune aging.

By analyzing about 500 swabs collected Coronavirus Researchers at the University of Washington have found a significant difference between patients and controls in the body of the elderly that initiates an immune response more slowly than the body of the young.

And, compared to women, the male immune system struggles to calm down after the most pressing threat of the virus has passed. This may facilitate uncontrolled inflammation that has proven fatal in many COVID-19 patients.

While it is impossible to articulate why a virus that does not cause symptoms in the person who catches the virus is deadly to others, new research suggests that there is an undeniable pattern in the list of survivors and victims of coronavirus. Provides some clues to match.

Data for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which lags other trackers and accounts for approximately 140,000 of the approximately 190,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States, is 85 years old or older.

Another 26% of those who died were between 75 and 84.

The elderly are clearly one of the most vulnerable populations to coronaviruses.

Each year, older people develop pneumonia due to infections such as influenza and other respiratory infections. These infections are uncomfortable for young people, but don’t worry.

Broadly speaking, the fatal effects of coronaviruses on the elderly are consistent with what we know about aging and infectious diseases. Older people are generally weak, including the immune system.

Much of the research trying to establish whether and how people develop immunity has focused on T and B cell activity. The former is a sharpened weapon to combat a specific infection and the latter is a sharpened weapon to instruct B cells to produce another special weapon, the antibody.

Both of these are part of the adaptive immunity and part of the immune system that develops in the course of our lives in response to the pathogens we encounter as we travel around the world.

It is adaptive immunity that provides some protection from reinfection to those who have recovered from COVID-19 (although the extent or duration of protection is still unknown).

When it comes to protection against coronaviruses in the first encounter, “we are dealing more with the adaptive innate immune system,” lead research author Dr. Alex Glenninger told DailyMail.com.

“When you look at the virus, it’s all about moving the virus to the next host with the highest possible load. It’s not about trying to establish a chronic infection. People have chronic complications. It may be, but it isn’t.

“It’s about screwing the innate immune system.”

From the skin to the tiny cells of white blood cells, it’s born from the innate immune system, which is made up of crude but effective tools that block infection, including interleukins and cytokines.

These cells are not conditioned to fight certain pathogens, but attack foreign bodies in the body.

By analyzing the “brain-shaking” nasopharyngeal swabs of hundreds of people who tested for coronavirus positivity and negativeness, Dr. Glenninger and his team sequenced the genome to determine which genes turned on depending on the virus. I was able to confirm exactly whether it was turned on or off.

In addition, we were able to see how brightly the genetic dimmer switches that code for various immune cells light up, depending on the age, sex and viral load of each person.

‘Some genes [that code for innate immune cells] It’s the most “on” on a population basis, so you can see that older people have the least amount of upregulation,” Dr. Glenninger explained.

“We expect them to respond…but not. The ability to get the immune system up really fast doesn’t really exist in older people.

Its slow immune response gives the virus the opportunity to further establish and replicate it before the body notices it. Elderly people also have high baseline levels of inflammation, and when the immune system responds and spills into many potential sites of infection, the resulting additional inflammation quickly becomes overwhelming and deadly. May be.

The University of Washington’s analysis revealed clues as to why men are more struggling to fight the virus, which were significantly different from the disadvantages of the elderly.

While the elderly body struggles to turn on the immune system, nasal swabs taken from men with COVID-19 show weak activity from genes that turn off the immune response. It was.

If the “off-switch” doesn’t work properly, inflammation by immune cytokines can last much longer than it does in men, overwhelming the body, but not fatal to many older people. It is due to the mechanism.