Cutaneous Manifestations of Aging and Immunodeficiency

Abstract

Aging is defined as a time-sequential deterioration of living things that is prompted by increased susceptibility to disease and adverse events, leading to loss of viability and physiologic functions. In simpler terms, aging is characterized by the individual’s inability to respond in a useful way to stress. Perhaps the most vital physiological component a person has for surviving aging is their body’s immune system. Along with the ability to clear antigens from the body, the immune system is equally important in keeping the body’s own physiology in check by monitoring for reactions that may go awry and unchecked, leading to malignancies, or helping the body rebuild and reshape itself in the face of any stress. Decreased ability to cope with stressors expected to be handled by the immune system could support the notion that aging may itself be considered a disease state. Although aging is accompanied by a decline in normal immune function of the B and T cells, aging is not reflected in profound changes in one of the many variables used to assess immune status with respect to a specific disease such as in HIV’s viral load or T cell count. Without the benefit of specific laboratory-derived values to measure in discrete steps a shrinking of immune function, the concept of immunodeficiency being a disease state of the elderly might itself be arbitrary.