Inflamm-aging as a diverse and context-dependent process: from species and population differences to individual trajectories.

Abstract

Inflamm-aging is widely considered a hallmark of aging, yet emerging evidence challenges its universality. Here, we re-examine inflamm-aging through an eco-evolutionary lens, underlining its context dependence across biological scales. Combining mechanistic, evolutionary, comparative, anthropological, genetic, and environmental evidence, we show how fundamental inflammatory mechanisms are integrated and regulated in diverse biological contexts, representing a suite of flexible stress responses. Drawing on studies from non-industrialized populations, which suggest that inflamm-aging reflects mismatches between evolved human biology and industrialized exposomes, we explore how population-specific evolutionary histories and environmental exposures shape differential predispositions and trajectories of inflamm-aging. We propose that, to the extent that inflammation represents this broad suite of stress responses, increases in at least some dimensions of inflammation with age should be nearly universal, as other physiological processes break down and internal stresses mount. However, the particular set of internal stressors that is triggered in a given species, environmental context, or individual is likely more specific, implying that there is unlikely to be any universal signature of inflamm-aging. The question of whether inflamm-aging is universal thus hinges on whether it is defined broadly as any increase in activation of any inflammatory systems, or more narrowly as a particular suite, such as those activated in industrialized populations with high levels of sedentary behavior and cardiometabolic diseases. Inflamm-aging is ultimately a norm of reaction - an aging-related inflammatory profile whose phenotypic expression varies with genotype and environment - and research should therefore focus on understanding how ecological, evolutionary, and environmental factors modulate inflammation and its age-related trajectory.