Age-related relationships among peripheral B lymphocyte subpopulations

An immunological data-driven model is proposed, for age related changes in the network of relationships among cell quantities of eight peripheral B lymphocyte subpopulations, that is, cells exhibiting all combinations of three specific receptor clusters (CD27, CD23, CD5). The model is based on immunological data (quantities of cells exhibiting CD19, characterizing B lymphocytes) from about six thousands patients, having an age ranging between one day and ninety-five years, by means of a suitably combination of data analysis methods, such as piecewise linear regression models. With relaxed values for statistically significant models (coefficient p-values bounded by 0.05), we found a network holding for all ages, that likely represents the general assessment of adaptive immune system for healthy human beings. When statistical validation comes to be more restrictive, we found that some of these interactions are lost with aging, as widely observed in medical literature. Namely, interesting (inverse or directed) proportions are highlighted among mutual quantities of a partition of peripheral B lymphocytes.