AGE & IMMUNITY
00:00
GVs, people walking in the street
Pull out, exterior Centre for Applied Gerentology, Universit of Birmingham
Rosina Ward walking into the Centre for Applied Gerontology
GVs - blood samples being drawn from Rosina Ward
Guide Voice:
We all tend to assume that, as we get older, our health is inevitably going to deteriorate and there is little we can do to slow that process - but new research suggests that may not have to be the case. Rosina Ward, seen here entering the Centre for Applied Gerontology at the University of Birmingham in England, isn’t a patient – she’s a volunteer in a new study seeking to understand why we become more vulnerable to common infections as we get older. Research from the University has shown that, as we age, greater numbers of T-Cells, which play a key role in directing the immune system, become tied up in responding to a virus known as Cytomegalovirus, or CMV.
00:41 SOT: Paul Moss, Professor of Haematology, University of Birmingham – “CMV is one of the eight human herpes viruses in the environment and it’s a very common virus, most of us will be affected in out lifetime but interestingly it’s usually a silent infection and we never know when we’re infected. We get infected by various means, commonly through breast milk actually from our mothers, so it’s a virus that we carry for many decades. Like all viruses in this group CMV is very interesting because you never get rid of the virus, once you have it you have to live with it and you can never eradicate it and it’s the consequences of living with the virus that interest our research group.”
01:24
Exterior – Centre for Cancer Studies
GVs Researcher (Odette Chagoury) in the Lab preparing samples etc
Guide Voice:
Researchers from the university’s Institute for Cancer Studies have been analysing the levels of T helper cells that were activated in response to the CMV virus in blood samples from a group of healthy donors aged 60 and over. These volunteers were drawn from the membership of the "The Thousand Elders Panel", a nationwide group, set up by the Centre for Applied Gerontology, to help investigate the needs of older people.
01:51 SOT: Dr Laxman Nayak, University of Birmingham’s Centre for Applied Gerontology – “Professor Paul Moss came to us and he said to us ‘look we are interested in recruiting some of the members of the 1000 elders’ and we sent letter to all the members of 1000 elders and we recruited them by explaining to them our research into cancer studies and it involves giving a blood sample which will then be analysed by the laboratories and the University of Birmingham. And our people are always interested in medical research even though initially we started off with the design of products but they are also interested in medical research because after all they think they are contributing to the future generation”.
02:42
Researcher bringing samples to microscope
Researcher examining samples
c.u. samples under microscope
Graphic representation of CMV cell
GVs – Researcher preparing samples for analysis
Guide Voice:
Researchers compared the T cell levels of donors from the Thousand Elders Panel with similar samples from another group of volunteers aged under 40. The results have been striking, showing that the level of T-Cell response to CMV in the elderly donors was disproportionately high, suggesting that the virus is occupying more of our immune system as we get older. CMV typically infects 7 in 10 of the population so these are obviously significant findings. For most of us the virus will remain dormant, without causing any symptoms, although it can be a serious health problem amongst patients with compromised immune systems as is shown here, with the action of the CMV virus on cells stripped of their immunity. The researchers found that the number of T-Cells responding to the CMV virus was more than twice as high in the older group. On average nearly 6% of their total T Cell response was directed at CMV compared to only 2.3% in the younger group. The study also showed that donors infected with CMV had fewer T helper cells that were capable of responding to newly encountered pathogens and this suggests that the presence of CMV in the body compromises the immune system.
03:51 SOT: Paul Moss – “The challenge now is how to control this immune response. In the long term it would be nice to think that we could control the rate of CMV infection and that means perhaps developing a vaccine against the virus or stopping the spread in some way. But for those people who are infected that really doesn’t offer very much. So we are working on drugs that will suppress the virus to a lower level and therefore control this immune response and we’ve got some actually quite encouraging responses in that area already and it may be that these agents given to elderly people when their immune system is not functioning properly may actually help to repair some of this damage”.
04:33
GVs general public on the street showing a wide age range.
Guide Voice:
In this modern age more and more of us expect to live a longer life – but we often accept that it will be at the expense of our general health. This research shows that there’s a real possibility that our immune systems could be as healthy in our seventies as they are in our 40s. A healthy prospect all round!
04:52
End of cut piece
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL 04:56
Set up shots – Professor Paul Moss and researcher Odette Chagoury at the microscope discussing the research project.
05:22 SOT: Paul Moss – “We’ve got a very big interest in the function of the immune system and in people particularly as they get old, a phenomenon called ‘immune phonessence’ which is how the immune system deteriorates with age. It’s well known that as people get older their ability to fight infection gets compromised and perhaps the best example is the influenza epidemic which we get every year and that really not as serious a problem in middle aged people but in elderly people their infection rate’s the same but their morbidity and mortality rates are much much higher. So why is their immune system failing as they get old? As so we’re interested in the reasons for that.”
06:06 SOT: Paul Moss – “The long-term aim is I think we need to find a mechanism to control the size of this CMV immune response because we believe that if you can control it the immune system does have the capacity to recover and therefore we believe that this should actually improve immune function in people at any age if we find the right medical treatment.”
