Immunity system complexity: male female T cells differ aging (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, December 08, 2024, 20:14 (53 days ago) @ David Turell

Woman maintain more T cells:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2458812-killer-cells-explain-differences-in-immuni...

"As women age, they produce an increasing number of “killer” immune cells, which hunt down and destroy infected cells. This discovery, and the fact that the same isn’t true of men, could help to explain why women are less likely to catch infections but have higher rates of autoimmune conditions.

"We already know that women tend to have stronger immune systems than men, but because studies tend to focus on men or male animals, we lack a detailed understanding of how immunity really differs between the sexes.

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"Maria Sopena Rios at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain and her colleagues analysed data on nearly 1.3 million immune cells collected as part of a previous research project. The cells came from blood samples collected from more than 500 female and around 400 male participants, making this the largest study of its kind so far. They were aged from 19 to 97 and all were living in Australia. There were no transgender or non-binary people in the study.

"The researchers found that the number of a subset of CD8 T-cells, which form part of the immune system by killing other cells, increased with age in the female participants, but the same pattern wasn’t seen in the male volunteers.

"This may be why women have a reduced risk of infections, as these T-cells target infected cells. It could also explain why women are more likely to have an autoimmune condition, if the same T-cells mistakenly attack healthy cells.

"For instance, these T-cells also showed genetic changes that have previously been linked to Crohn’s disease, when immune cells attack the gut, and, again, these changes were only seen in the female participants.

"This suggests that differing numbers of these T-cells could partly account for sex-based differences in infections and autoimmunity, though the study didn’t demonstrate a causal link."

Comment: in a sexual species the female is more important than the male. The male fertilizes eggs, but it is the female who carries the forming fetus. This is pure evidence of design while in purposeless evolution this need would not be recognized.