Older adults are much more likely to become seriously ill from flu or COVID because aging lung cells can drive excessive immune responses, according to a new study led by researchers at UC San Francisco.
The findings enhance the understanding of the inflammation that accompanies aging, explaining how an otherwise minor cough can sometimes send an elderly person to the hospital.
To understand what goes wrong in old lungs, the scientists engineered the lung’s structural cells, fibroblasts, to turn on an age-related distress signal in young mice. The signal led the lungs to form clusters of inflamed cells, including some marked by the GZMK gene, which was first seen in severe COVID-19. A future therapy might target these cells to counter the damaging spiral of inflammaging.
“We were…