White Blood Cells Could Tell Your Fortune

Main Category: Blood / Hematology
Also Included In: Seniors / Aging
Article Date: 28 Jun 2008 - 2:00 PDT

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BIN those tarot cards and cancel the visit to the palm reader. It might one day be possible to predict how long you'll live from a sample of your white blood cells.

It is well known that the children of long-lived parents tend to be long-lived too, but no one knows why. As white blood cells fend off infection, in effect they are delaying death. So Sonya Vasto and her colleagues at the University of Palermo in Italy wondered whether these cells might hold any clues to longevity.

The team took samples of white blood cells from 45 men and women aged between 75 and 90, who all had parents born in Sicily between 1900 and 1908. Twenty-five of the donors had one parent who had reached 100 and one who had died of old age before reaching average life expectancy for Italians, which is 67 for men and 72 for women. The remaining 20 donors served as controls, having lost both parents before they reached average life expectancy.

The researchers found that the two groups differed in the number of naive B-cells, a type of white blood cell, that their blood contained. "Our main finding was the increase in naive B-cells in individuals who had centenarian parents," says Vasto, who is presenting the results this weekend at a conference on ageing in Los Angeles, organised by the Methuselah Foundation. Because the results are only preliminary, she will not disclose the extent of the increase as yet.

The finding makes sense, Vasto says. B-cells are vital components of the immune system, producing antibodies to combat foreign invaders, such as bacteria. Unlike mature B-cells, which are primed to attack foes the body has seen before, naive B-cells are ready and waiting to attack microbes not previously encountered.

The bigger this "reserve army", the longer someone is likely to be able to keep fighting off new infections, says Vasto, which might prolong life.

She hopes that naive B-cell counts might be used to predict longevity and even lead to a way for everyone to live longer: if people discover they have fewer naive B-cells, they might take extra steps to forestall infections, she says.

Aubrey de Grey, a gerontologist at the University of Cambridge and chairman of the Methuselah Foundation, says that naive B-cells are one of the first physiological markers of old age to be identified. "There has been depressingly little success thus far in identifying factors that can predict how long someone will live," he says. "We won't know for a while whether these findings can form the basis for life-extending interventions, but there's every chance they will."

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