There are many factors that go into why you see more older people with skin cancer than younger people. One of these is because most of the damage caused by the sun’s UV rays is long term damage. Older people a lot of the time are paying the price for what they did earlier in their life.
That’s not the only factor however, it has been proven that older skin just doesn’t respond as effectively when trying to fight off infection. There was an article this weekend on the BBC News website entitled “Elderly Skin Raises Cancer Risk” that talks about a recent study they did over there in the United Kingdom.
The study, who’s findings will be published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, found out that as you grow older your skin’s immune system losing some of its ability to respond. This contradicted earlier thinking that problems with T-cells, a type of immune cell, were responsible for immunity decreasing with age. It turned out in fact that it was the skin’s inability to get the t-cells to where they were needed that was to blame.
For the study they took two groups of people, one of 40 year old people and one of people over the age of 70. Both of these groups were then injected with an antigen in order to stimulate an immune response in in the skin. As they had expected the immune response was much slower in the group of older individuals.
What was surprising was that when they went to look at the t-cell’s, they discovered that nothing was wrong with them. The t-cells were not to blame. Rather, the skin just lacked the ability to direct the t-cells to the place where they were needed.
“At the outset we thought it would be the cells responsible for combating infections that might be at fault, but the surprising thing was the T cells were fine but they couldn’t get into the skin – the signals were missing,” Mr Akbar said.
He said it raised the possibility of ways to boost the immune system in older people to give them a better chance of fighting infection and reducing the risk of skin cancer.
“The question that it raises is what survival advantage there is to this, is there a negative reason for having too much immunity in the skin when you get older?
“Going in to intervene may have consequences that we don’t realise and that’s where we need to do more research.”
This is significant because this problem is something that is much easier to fix than if it was damage to the actual cells. The cells are there, they just need to be directed where they need to go. This is a much more treatable problem to have. The more doctors know about how the body ages health wise, the better they can go about figuring out how to best protect it.
Leave a comment