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International Immunology Advance Access originally published online on September 1, 2005
International Immunology 2005 17(10):1359-1366; doi:10.1093/intimm/dxh314
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© The Japanese Society for Immunology. 2005. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

Age-related differences in phenotype and function of CD4+ T cells are due to a phenotypic shift from naive to memory effector CD4+ T cells

Rania D. Kovaiou, Ilka Weiskirchner, Michael Keller, Gerald Pfister, Daniel P. Cioca and Beatrix Grubeck-Loebenstein

Institute for Biomedical Aging Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Rennweg 10, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria

Correspondence to: B. Grubeck-Loebenstein; E-mail: beatrix.Grubeck{at}oeaw.ac.at

Based on the combined expression of CD27 and CD28, a putative model of T cell differentiation has been previously proposed. We used CD27 and CD28 expression in order to comparatively study the size, cytokine production capacity and proliferative response of CD4+ T cell sub-populations from healthy young and elderly volunteers. Elderly persons had a lower percentage of CD27+CD28+ but a higher percentage of CD27–CD28+ and CD27–CD28–CD4+ T cells than the young persons. CD27–CD28–CD4+ T cells were present, although at relatively low numbers, in the vast majority of the healthy elderly donors but were only sporadically detected in young persons. Each CD4+ T cell sub-population exhibited a distinct phenotype and cytokine production profile, which were not affected by age. When purified CD27+CD28+ were stimulated by staphylococcal enterotoxin B, they proliferated to a greater extent than CD27–CD28+ and CD27–CD28–CD4+ T cells. However, we did not observe age-related differences in proliferative response of each sub-population. We concluded that although the size of the different sub-populations differed between the young and the old group, the functional characteristics of each sub-population were the same in both age groups. This suggests that on a per cell basis there is no functional impairment of CD4 memory T cells in elderly persons. Consequently, potential differences in the function of the total CD4+ T cell population are most likely due to different composition of repertoire.

Keywords: aging, CD27, CD28, cytokines, differentiation

Transmitting editor: S. Swain


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