Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors (IfADo), Ardeystraße 67, 44139 Dortmund, Germany.
Int J Mol Sci. 2023 Aug 24;24(17):13186. doi: 10.3390/ijms241713186.
Immunological aging type definition requires establishing reference intervals from the distribution of immunosenescence biomarkers conditional on age. For 1605 individuals (18-97 years), we determined the comprehensive immune age index IMMAX from flow-cytometry-based blood cell sub-populations and identified age-specific centiles by fitting generalized additive models for location, scale, and shape. The centiles were uncorrelated with age and facilitated the categorization of individuals as immunologically slow or fast aging types. Using its 50th percentile as a reference, we rescaled the IMMAX to equivalent years of life (EYOL) and computed the immunological age gap as the difference between EYOL and chronological age. Applied to preliminary baseline and follow-up measurements from 53 participants of the Dortmund Vital Study (Clinical-Trials.gov Identifier: NCT05155397), the averaged changes in the IMMAX and EYOL conformed to the 5-year follow-up period, whereas no significant changes occurred concerning IMMAX centiles and age gap. This suggested that the participants immunologically adapted to aging and kept their relative positions within the cohort. Sex was non-significant. Methodical comparisons indicated that future confirmatory analyses with the completed follow-up examinations could rely on percentile curves estimated by simple linear quantile regression, while the selection of the immunosenescence biomarker will greatly influence the outcome, with IMMAX representing the preferable choice.
免疫衰老类型的定义需要根据年龄确定免疫衰老生物标志物的分布，从而建立参考区间。在 1605 名个体（18-97 岁）中，我们通过基于流式细胞术的血细胞亚群确定了综合免疫年龄指数 IMMAX，并通过拟合位置、比例和形状的广义加性模型确定了特定年龄的百分位数。这些百分位数与年龄无关，有助于将个体分类为免疫衰老速度较慢或较快的类型。我们将 IMMAX 以其第 50 个百分位数作为参考进行了重新调整，以等效的生命年（EYOL）表示，并计算了免疫年龄差距，即 EYOL 与实际年龄的差值。将其应用于多特蒙德生命研究（Clinical-Trials.gov 标识符：NCT05155397）53 名参与者的初步基线和随访测量中，IMMAX 和 EYOL 的平均变化与 5 年随访期一致，而 IMMAX 百分位数和年龄差距没有发生显著变化。这表明参与者在免疫上适应了衰老，并在队列中保持了相对位置。性别无显著影响。方法学比较表明，未来随着完成的随访检查进行的验证性分析可以依赖于简单线性分位数回归估计的百分位数曲线，而免疫衰老生物标志物的选择将极大地影响结果，其中 IMMAX 是更好的选择。
