"Some of our basic assumptions about the biological process of aging might be wrong," reports the New York Times — citing
new research on a small Indigenous population in the Bolivian Amazon. [
Alternate URL here.]
Scientists have long believed that long-term, low-grade inflammation — also known as "inflammaging" — is a universal hallmark of getting older. But this new data raises the question of whether inflammation is directly linked to aging at all, or if it's linked to a person's lifestyle or environment instead. The study, which was published Monday, found that people in two nonindustrialized areas experienced a different kind of inflammation throughout their lives than more urban people — likely tied to infections from bacteria, viruses and parasites rather than the precursors of chronic disease. Their inflammation also didn't appear to increase with age.
Scientists compared inflammation signals in existing data sets from four distinct populations in Italy, Singapore, Bolivia and Malaysia; because they didn't collect the blood samples directly, they couldn't make exact apples-to-apples comparisons. But if validated in larger studies, the findings could suggest that diet, lifestyle and environment influence inflammation more than aging itself, said Alan Cohen, an author of the paper and an associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. "Inflammaging may not be a direct product of aging, but rather a response to industrialized conditions," he said, adding that this was a warning to experts like him that they might be overestimating its pervasiveness globally.
"How we understand inflammation and aging health is based almost entirely on research in high-income countries like the U.S.," said Thomas McDade, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University. But a broader look shows that there's much more global variation in aging than scientists previously thought, he added... McDade, who has previously studied inflammation in the Tsimane group, speculated that populations in nonindustrialized regions might be exposed to certain microbes in water, food, soil and domestic animals earlier in their lives, bolstering their immune response later in life.
More from The Independent:
Chronic inflammation is thought to speed up the ageing process and contribute to various health conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, arthritis, cancer, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes... However, other experts shared a word of caution before jumping to conclusions from the study. Vishwa Deep Dixit, director of the Yale Center for Research on Aging, told the New York Times it's not surprising that people less exposed to pollution would see lower rates of chronic disease.
Aurelia Santoro, an associate professor at the University of Bologna, also cautioned about the results, according to the Times. "While they had lower rates of chronic disease, the two Indigenous populations tended to have life spans shorter than those of people in industrialized regions, meaning they may simply not have lived long enough to develop inflammaging, Santoro said."
And Bimal Desai, a professor of pharmacology who studies inflammation at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, told the Times that the study "sparks valuable discussion" but needs more follow-up "before we rewrite the inflammaging narrative."
