Figure 1.

Immune adaptation mediated by early life adversity. Early-life adversity (ELA) is broken down into its four key components: psychosocial stress, infectious stress, nutrition and the microbiome; and pollutant exposure. They are linked to increases in the numbers of senescent cytotoxic lymphocyte (sCTL) which, upon stimulation are resistant to apoptosis and release large quantities of expression of pro-inflammatory. Certain elements have also been shown to alter the underlying transcriptional identity of leucocytes such as macrophages, dendritic cells or T lymphocytes. This phenomenon is called “the conserved transcriptional response to adversity” (CTRA).