Loneliness, dementia, depression, Parkinson’s disease, mental stress and compromised gastrointestinal function may result in malnutrition, insufficient protein intake, vitamin deficiencies (especially vitamins A, C and E with antioxidative activities) and deficiencies in trace elements (especially zinc, which is crucial for lymphocyte Lapatinib price proliferation); all of these factors can result in compromised immune functions [7–10]. In

addition, the elderly are more susceptible to malignancies, severe infections and long-term repeated chronic infections; they experience more trauma, have more major surgeries and have increased incidence of late-stage systemic diseases (renal dysfunction, liver failure and heart failure) and other critical illnesses, all of which may also significantly compromise immune function [11–14]. Moreover, those elderly people who take anti-inflammatory drugs, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, steroids, antibiotics, antidepressants, antihypertensives or allopurinol may also experience compromised immune function [15, 16]. Thus, even the SENIEUR protocol that has been accepted worldwide cannot meet all of the criteria necessary for selecting healthy NSC 683864 subjects for ageing-related studies. Thus, the SENIEUR protocol was modified and improved with the aim of excluding those factors that could influence cellular immunity. In the present study, 28,376

subjects who were self-reported as healthy were reviewed over an 8-month period. From these, we enrolled 78 subjects aged ≥80 years, 128 subjects aged 60–80 years and 60 subjects aged 20–60 years. Although the number of older subjects, especially those aged ≥80 years, was small and may have

contributed to underestimating the extent of compromised immune function among the elderly, our findings may actually demonstrate the direct selleck kinase inhibitor impact of ageing on cellular immunity. As is well known, antigen-presenting cells (APCs) may undergo differentiation and maturation following stimulation with antigens or other stimuli, after which they present antigens to naïve T cells, which become activated T cells. T cell-mediated specific immunity plays a central role in immune responses. T cell activation is primarily characterized by proliferation, and thus, T cell proliferation has been used as a marker of human immune potential. In addition, following treatment with multiple cytokines (recombinant human IL-2, IL-1, γ-INF and CD3 mAb), some PBMCs can become transformed into CD3- and CD56-positive CIK cells, which have both potent antitumour activities as T lymphocytes and non-MHC-restricted tumouricidal activities as NK cells. Thus, CIK tumouricidal activity can also be used as an indicator of human immune function [17, 18]. Our findings revealed that there were no marked differences in the number of peripheral blood total T cells, CD4+ cells, CD8+ cells or CD4+/CD8+ ratios among the subject groups of different ages.