How does aging affect her immune system?
How does aging affect your immune system? Well, that depends on whether you look at your chronological age or your biological age. Your biological age is extremely specific for you as an individual. Your biological age will dictate your overall health, your susceptibility towards chronic disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and even longevity.
When speaking about the aging immune system, there is a term called immunosenescence. Cellular senescence is increasingly linked to biological aging of the immune cells. This is broadly considered for aging related alterations, accuracy, and efficiency of the immune system and the immune response.
How do we assess your biological age, and specifically related to your immune system? In my last email, I briefly discussed the new science of epigenetic methylation. This test assesses the on/off switch of your genes. This test does not store your genetic profile, in fact it must destroy the genes to reach these on/off switches. There are over 900,000 of these switches that are evaluated. A segment of this analysis is extrinsic epigenetic age. This is directly assessing your immune system in relation to aging.
80% of the factors that control your biological age can be improved through specific lifestyle guidelines. Decreasing your biological age by 7 years results in a decrease in the mortality rate by 50%. Research has shown that a proper program can make positive changes, decreasing your biological age, in as little as 8 weeks (about 2 months). At the eighth week there is a test called rate of biological aging which will show if you are on the right program to improve your immune system, as well as overall health.
