Scientists find better vaccines for older people

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As we get older, our bodies change a lot, and one of the things that change is our immune system. This is important because it means older people are more likely to get really sick from infections and diseases like cancer.

Scientists at The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) and UConn Health are studying why vaccines sometimes don’t work as well for older people.

Let’s start with a bacteria called Streptococcus pneumoniae. This bacteria can make you very sick, causing pneumonia, meningitis, and sepsis. Babies and older people are especially at risk.

There are vaccines to protect against this bacteria, like PPSV23 (Pneumovax), which work pretty well in older people, but not as well as they do in younger people.

Scientists have tried to make these vaccines better by adding a protein to them, which has led to new vaccines like PCV13 (Prevnar). Even with these improvements, the effectiveness of these vaccines still decreases as people age.

To understand this better, a team of researchers, including JAX’s Duygu Ucar, UConn Health’s George Kuchel, and Immunoledge’s Jacques Banchereau, studied a group of 39 healthy adults over 60 years old.

They compared how these people’s immune systems were before and after getting vaccinated.

Their research, published in Nature Immunology, found that people have different biological traits that affect how they respond to the two different types of vaccines. They discovered that certain traits before getting vaccinated can predict how well a vaccine will work.

One key finding was that the presence of two types of T cells, Th1 and Th17, in your blood before you get the PCV13 vaccine can predict how well the vaccine will work for you.

Th1 cells help your body quickly fight off infections, while Th17 cells also help but in a different way. Interestingly, they found that women generally respond better to the PCV13 vaccine than men do.

They also found something called the CYTOX signature, which is linked to a type of cell called mature CD16+ natural killer (NK) cells.

If you have a lot of these cells, the PCV13 vaccine might not work as well for you. But this CYTOX signature doesn’t affect how well the other vaccine, PPSV23, works.

The researchers say that their findings can help in making vaccination more effective for older people. They believe that by understanding an individual’s immune system before vaccination, they can choose the best vaccine for each person.

Another interesting point from their study is that the ways your body predicts how well you’ll respond to the two different vaccines are totally different, even though both vaccines target the same bacteria.

What this all means is that in the future, doctors might be able to look at an older person’s immune system and figure out which vaccine would work best for them.

This could lead to better protection against infections and diseases for older adults, which is really important as our population ages.

If you care about health, please read studies that vitamin D can help reduce inflammation, and vitamin K could lower your heart disease risk by a third.

For more information about health, please see recent studies about new way to halt excessive inflammation, and results showing foods that could cause inflammation.

The research findings can be found in Nature Immunology.

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