Archival ReportChronic Low-Grade Inflammation in Elderly Persons Is Associated with Altered Tryptophan and Tyrosine Metabolism: Role in Neuropsychiatric Symptoms
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were recruited from a subsample of the Three-City (3C) study, an epidemiological cohort study that included 9294 persons, 65 years of age and over, not institutionalized, and living in Bordeaux, Dijon, and Montpellier in 1999–2000. The general methodology of the 3C study was published elsewhere (38). Participants in the present study (n = 284) were drawn from the Bordeaux site at 7-year follow up, the only site where concomitant inflammatory assays and detailed neuropsychiatric
Results
Two hundred eighty-four subjects were included. The mean age of participants was 79.9 years (SD = 4.5 years), and the median age was 80 years. One hundred ninety-seven participants (69.4%) were women, and forty (14%) had a lifetime history of major depression. The mean BMI in the study population was 25.4 kg/m2 (SD = 4.0). Data for biological markers and relationships with age, as assessed by multiple regression analyses controlling for gender and BMI, are shown in Table 1. Overall, there was a
Discussion
Results from this study clearly support the notion of inflammaging (11, 12), because they indicate significant relationships between aging and circulating concentrations of immune markers. As expected, older age was associated with increased concentrations of both IL-6 and neopterin, indicative of immune activation in elderly persons. In addition, older age together with inflammation correlated negatively with tryptophan concentrations and positively with kynurenine concentrations and with the
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Authors SL and DF contributed equally to this work.