Inflammaging and Its Role in Ageing and Age-Related Diseases

Abstract

The growing number of elderly and the increase in age-related diseases are pressing issues for medicine and public health. Inflammaging (i.e. a chronic, low-grade inflammatory status that occurs during ageing) represents a common mechanism to the vast majority of age-related disorders. Accordingly, inflammaging and inflammation are strategic targets for prevention and treat- ment of these conditions. Inflammation and stress response are the result of a complex network of interactions between genes and environment. They are ancestrally interconnected and can be considered a most ancient and evolutionary-conserved maintenance/repair mechanism owing to its crucial capability to cope with and neutralize damaging agents. Evolutionary adapta- tion is thus treated as a “plural model”, according to Ingold [1]. In this chapter, we illustrate the evolution of inflammation/stress response, the role of inflammation during ageing, including whatwepropose to call “immunological biography”, which includes all the immune adaptive mechanisms that occur lifelong. We contextualize inflammaging within a human eco-anthropological perspective to better understand the role that changes occurred in the human environment in the last 200 years played in the demographic explosion of the elderly population. This comprehensive view on inflammation and inflam- maging can have a far-reaching beneficial impact in the medical field and, in particular, could represent a strong, evolutionary-based conceptual framework to identify the most effective strategies (e.g. dietary interventions) to slow ageing and avoid/postpone age-related pathologies.