Marcadores inmunológicos de envejecimiento

Ageing is a process involving morphological and physiological modifications that gradually appear with time and lead to death. Given the heterogeneous nature of the process among individuals and among the different organs, tissues, and systems in the same individual, the concept of «biological age» has been developed. The search for parameters that enable us to evaluate biological age-and therefore longevity-and the analysis of the efficacy of strategies to retard the ageing process are the objectives of gerontology. At present, one of the most important theories of ageing is the «oxidative-inflammatory» theory. Given that immune cell function is an excellent marker of health, we review the concepts that enable different functional and oxidative stress parameters in immune cells to be identified as markers of biological age and longevity. None of these parameters is universally accepted as a biomarker of ageing, although they are becoming increasingly important.