As humans age, it is generally thought that our bodies experience chronic, low-grade inflammation, which opens the door to age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. However, new research from an international group of scientists published in the journal Nature Aging reveals that “inflammaging” is not a universal human phenomenon, but rather one that is more common in industrialized populations.
In their joint analysis of data from two industrialized populations in Italy and Singapore and two non-industrialized populations from the Bolivian Amazon and Peninsular Malaysia, the researchers found that the non-industrialized populations did not exhibit increased inflammation with age.
While short-term inflammation is essential to healing infections, chronic inflammation is known to damage organs and accelerate chronic diseases of aging.
“In those populations, we noticed that common biomarkers of inflammation weren’t increasing with age,” said UC Santa Barbara anthropologist Michael Gurven, who directs the Tsimané Health and Life History Project, and is a senior author on the Nature Aging paper. “We wondered whether this pattern might be more common in similar high-infection contexts.”
Led by Maximilien Franck at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada, the researchers analyzed 19 cytokines (small proteins involved in inflammation) from industrialized and non-industrialized cohort studies.