Viral Profile of COPD Exacerbations According to Patients§

Dimopoulos, G; Tsiodras, S; Lerikou, M; Chranioti, Aik; Perros, E; Anagnostopoulou, U; Karakitsos, P; Armaganidis, A

The Open Respiratory Medicine Journal, 2015, Volume 9 5 Fig. (1) . Elderly vs non-elderly patients with viral infections. general hospitalized population. This group of patients is characterized by a decline of the immunological response to infection, principally due to functional insufficiency of monocytes and macrophages that results to inadequate phagocytosis, by the lack of antigen presenting cells, such as dendritic cells (so are naive T-cells due to thymus gland involution), by the loss of memory capacity of mature Tcells exhibiting a poor and/or altered cytokine production and by the decrease of the number of circulating B-cells resulting in a weaker response to antigenic challenges through immunoglobulin production [17, 18] . Elderly usually have higher rates of vaccination against influenza from their primary care physicians than non-elderly (although both are at risk) [15, 16] . However, no difference was detected either in influenza virus or other viruses' detection rates. This could be explained by the fact that immune responses to vaccination decline substantially with age thus the elderly have impaired humoral and cell mediated immune responses to influenza vaccines compared with younger adults [13, 14, [19] [20] [21] . It also points to the need for better prevention measures against respiratory viruses for this population.