• Question: do you think that there is a virus that causes ageing?

    Asked by Ruth1#rainbow to Carolyn on 17 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Carolyn Nielsen

      Carolyn Nielsen answered on 17 Nov 2015:

      Hi Ruth1#rainbow,

      So the virus I study is called cytomegalovirus. It’s a member of the herpesviruses family which includes varicella zoster (which causes chicken pox and shingles) and Epstein Barr (which can cause glandular fever). All herpesviruses establish what we call chronic, persistent infections- which means your body can never get rid of them.

      Cytomegalovirus is really interesting because in the vast majority of people, there are no symptoms or disease. But long-term infections can still tire out some of your immune cells, we think mainly because they have to keep working to control the infection. So the changes we see in some immune cells look very similar to what we see during normal, healthy ageing. If you’re interested in specifics, we see an accumulation of mature natural killer cells (and some T cells) both during ageing and cytomegalovirus infection.

      So it’s not that cytomegalovirus will make you turn grey overnight, but it can subtly shift your immune system in similar ways.

      Hope that helps 🙂 Let me know if you have any follow up questions!

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