Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash
Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Chronic inflammation that comes with ageing might be due to industrialisation

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Peer-reviewed: This work was reviewed and scrutinised by relevant independent experts.

Observational study: A study in which the subject is observed to see if there is a relationship between two or more things (eg: the consumption of diet drinks and obesity). Observational studies cannot prove that one thing causes another, only that they are linked.

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Inflammation, long considered a hallmark of aging, may not be a universal human experience, according to international researchers who say it might actually be a byproduct of industrialised lifestyles. The team analysed data from two industrialised populations in Italy and Singapore and two Indigenous, non-industrialised populations from the Bolivian Amazon and Peninsular Malaysia. While the ‘inflammaging’ signature was similar in the two industrialised populations, it did not hold in the Indigenous groups, where inflammation levels were largely driven by infection rather than age.

Journal/conference: Nature Aging

Research: Paper

Organisation/s: University of Sherbrooke, Canada

Funder: This work was financially supported by the Impetus program. J.S. acknowledges financial support from the French National Research Agency (ANR) under the Investments for the Future (Investissements d’Avenir) program, grant ANR-17-EURE-0010. J.H. received funding support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under project ID 499552394 (SFB 1597/1) and grant HE9198/1-1. This research was supported in part by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH, National Institute on Aging. OA HeLP data collection was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant no. BCS-2142090). The funders were not involved in the study design, data collection and analysis, interpretation of results, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

Media release

From: Springer Nature

Chronic inflammation not associated with ageing in all populations

Human populations with less industrialized lifestyles may not experience inflammaging, a chronic low-grade inflammation that is linked with ageing, according to research published in Nature Aging. The findings are based on data from two industrialized populations in Italy and Singapore and two Indigenous, non-industrialized populations from the Bolivian Amazon and Peninsular Malaysia.

Short-term inflammation is essential to healing infections, but long-term exposure to inflammation (inflammaging) is known to increase biological ageing and the risk of developing age-related diseases. However, whether the effects of inflammaging are consistent across all human populations remains unclear.

Maximilien Franck and colleagues analysed datasets of 19 cytokines (small proteins involved in inflammation) from 2 industrialized cohort studies in Italy and Singapore and 2 non-industrialized cohorts — the Tsimane population from the Bolivian Amazon and the Orang Asli population from Peninsular Malaysia. In the industrialized cohorts, the authors observed a consistent signature of increased inflammation with age, which was associated with chronic age-related diseases, such as stroke, cardiovascular disease and cancer. However, in the two non-industrialized cohorts, Franck and co-authors did not detect increased inflammation with age. Chronic age-related diseases were also minimal in these cohorts and were not linked to inflammaging.

The findings highlight the importance of considering cultural, environmental and lifestyle factors when researching aging processes, and challenge existing paradigms around inflammaging. Future research could explore how specific environmental conditions modulate inflammaging and its effect on health outcomes, which could lead to more targeted approaches for preventing age-related diseases across different global populations.

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