Visceral fat obesity due to lack of exercise and satiety causes aging such as hunger, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and increases the risk of death.On the other hand, when an individual ages, immunosenescence (dysfunction of immune cells associated with aging) is observed, which causes various diseases.Professor Minato Nagahiro of Kyoto University explained that immunosenescence is not a functional deterioration of the entire T lymphocytes, but that aged T cells, which are rarely present in young mice, become the major T lymphocyte population in aged mice. It was clear that.

　This time, the research group investigated the relationship between visceral fat obesity and immunosenescence.As a result, it was found that a large amount of aged T lymphocyte population, which is not found in healthy young mice, appears in a large amount in the visceral fat of young mice that have been fattened by feeding a large amount of a high-fat diet.These aged T lymphocytes lost their normal immune response, were characteristic of cellular senescence (cell arresting), and had the property of producing a protein (osteopontin) that causes excessive inflammation.It was also found that immune cells called B lymphocytes are involved in the increase in aging T lymphocytes.

　In the future, recovery of immune function targeting the aged T lymphocyte population is expected to lead to the development of a treatment method aimed at preventing the onset of lifestyle-related diseases related to visceral fat obesity.It is said that it is a great achievement from the viewpoint of prevention of lifestyle-related diseases in patients with visceral fat obesity and also from the viewpoint of anti-aging medicine.