In 2019, a pre-eminent group of scientists including HIP Scientific Partner Network member Mark Davis and Co-Chief Science Officer Shai Shen-Orr published “A clinically meaningful metric of immune age derived from high-dimensional longitudinal monitoring” in Nature Medicine. Your immune system ages, but not necessarily at the same rate as your chronological age. Researchers followed 135 healthy adults over nine years, repeatedly measuring their immune cells and molecules to understand how the immune system changes over time. They discovered that different people’s immune systems age at different rates, and that immune cells gradually shift toward patterns typically seen in older adults—but everyone follows their own timeline based on their starting point.
From this data, the team created an “immune age” score called IMM-AGE that reflects how old your immune system actually is, regardless of how many birthdays you’ve celebrated. This score proved to be clinically valuable: it successfully predicted mortality risk in an independent study of thousands of people, even beyond traditional risk factors like blood pressure and cholesterol. This suggests that measuring immune age could help doctors identify patients who may be at higher risk for health problems, opening new possibilities for preventive care.
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