ArticlePLoS pathogens2022
Age-dependent virulence of human pathogens.
Article in PLoS pathogens, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Comparative Analysis of Aging Across Causes of Death.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- Older adults and extreme weather events: recommendations from the Research Centers Collaborative Network workshop.The journals of gerontology. Series A, Biological sciences and medical sciences · 2026Article
- Analysis of an AI-powered system for vaccination screening, monitoring, and management in adults aged 50 and above.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Prognostic Indicators of Carbapenem-ResistantHealth science reports · 2025Review
- HLA-DRB1*15:01 is associated with a reduced likelihood of longevity in northern European men.Genome medicine · 2025Article
- Competencies influencing childcare providers' infectious-disease prevention in routine and outbreak contexts: a study in South Korea.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Review
- Mosquito ageing modulates the development, virulence and transmission potential of pathogens.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Analysis of respiratory pathogens in pediatric acute respiratory infections in Lanzhou, Northwest China, 2019-2024.Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2024Article
- Higher body condition with infection byPeerJ · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Host age is often evoked as an intrinsic factor aggravating the outcome of host-pathogen interactions. However, the shape of the relationship between age and infection-induced mortality might differ among pathogens, with specific clinical and ecological traits making some pathogens more likely to exert higher mortality in older hosts. Here, we used a large dataset on age-specific case fatality rate (CFR) of 28 human infectious diseases to investigate i) whether age is consistently associated to increased CFR, ii) whether pathogen characteristics might explain higher CFR in older adults. We found that, for most of the infectious diseases considered here, CFR slightly decreased during the first years of life and then steeply increased in older adults. Pathogens inducing diseases with long-lasting symptoms had the steepest increase of age-dependent CFR. Similarly, bacterial diseases and emerging viruses were associated with increasing mortality risk in the oldest age classes. On the contrary, we did not find evidence suggesting that systemic infections have steeper slopes between CFR and age; similarly, the relationship between age and CFR did not differ according to the pathogen transmission mode. Overall, our analysis shows that age is a key trait affecting infection-induced mortality rate in humans, and that the extent of the aggravating effect on older adults depends on some key traits, such as the duration of illness.
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Registered trials
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