Aging and immune function.

Since it is too difficult to study aging of the organism as a whole, most investigators try to focus on a specific physiological system that exhibits age-dependent functional changes, in the hopes that elucidation (in biochemical and developmental terms) of the mechanism of senescent change will provide insight into the aging process itself. The immune system is among the most maleable of such models, in that well-defined cell types will produce well-defined molecules with predictable functions in vitro and in vivo. The increasing power of basic immunological science should, in the next decade, permit an increasingly fine appreciation of how aging leads to immune decline. This expanding conceptual framework will then suggest new ideas about the role of immunosenescence in degenerative, infectious, and neoplastic illnesses and may also generate increasingly rational strategies for therapeutic intervention.