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Age- and Race-Related Changes in Subpopulations of Peripheral Blood Lymphocytes in Humans

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Abstract

In humans, the adaptive and innate immune system works in concert to combat a variety of insults stemming from foreign invasion by pathogens to abnormal cancer cell growth. An increase in cancer as well as increased incidence and severity of infectious diseases occur with age. Changes in the function of the immune system with age, often termed immunosenescence, contribute to these age-related increases. Specifically, various changes in the different populations of immune cells have been described with age. We remain unable to assess functional immunity in vivo in man except with the crudest measures (e.g., antibody responses to vaccination, delayed-type hypersensitivity responses to intradermal antigen injection). Instead, we have made inferences about immune function in the tissues from quantitating immune subsets in the peripheral blood, recognizing that the relationship between these changes and functional immunity is not always completely clear. Here, we highlight how human aging affects the peripheral blood cell populations emphasizing specifically T and B cells that comprise the adaptive immune system and both natural killer (NK) cells and monocytes that make up the innate immune system. Importantly, we also focus on how race and ethnicity affect circulating cell populations as race-specific effects on these populations have clinical applications for diagnosis and interpretation of routine whole blood cell counts. How race and ethnicity influence various population subsets in the context of aging will also be discussed.

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Correspondence to Michele K. Evans .

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© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG

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Noren Hooten, N., Longo, D.L., Evans, M.K. (2018). Age- and Race-Related Changes in Subpopulations of Peripheral Blood Lymphocytes in Humans. In: Fulop, T., Franceschi, C., Hirokawa, K., Pawelec, G. (eds) Handbook of Immunosenescence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64597-1_85-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64597-1_85-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-64597-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-64597-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Biomedicine and Life SciencesReference Module Biomedical and Life Sciences

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