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Low-grade inflammation.”
It hardly sounds serious at all. An inconvenience, perhaps, like maybe a mild fever or a creaky joint. In the lexicon of aging and disease, there are far more worrisome words: cancer, heart disease, dementia, diabetes. But researchers have suspected for years that all of these health issues, and more, have at their heart one common trigger: low-grade inflammation. And now they may finally have proof.
Cardiologists in Boston have reported on a clinical trial with more than 10,000 patients in 39 countries (mean age: 61) that tested to see if an anti-inflammatory drug could lower rates of heart disease. They discovered that it could. But they also found that the same drug, canakinumab, reduced lung cancer mortality more than 77 percent, and reports of gout and arthritis (conditions linked to inflammation) also fell.
"Inflammation plays a role in everyone's health,” says Dana DiRenzo, a rheumatologist and instructor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. When inflammation levels increase, so does the risk of disease. But understanding inflammation can be tricky because, when you get a disease, inflammation levels naturally increase as your body fights the condition. Inflammation, in other words, is both good and bad.
Given how crucial this issue is to your health, AARP spoke with some of America's top experts in the field, pored over the latest studies and created this guide to understanding — and overcoming — inflammation.
Think about when you catch the flu and your body temperature rises to fight the virus. That's a form of inflammation. So is the redness and swelling that occur when you sprain your ankle; it's the process your body uses to provide the healing chemicals and nutrients needed to help repair the damage.
These are examples of acute inflammation, a temporary, helpful response to an injury or illness. Once the danger goes away, so does the inflammation.
Chronic inflammation, on the other hand, is a slow, creeping condition caused by a misfiring of the immune system that keeps your body in a constant, long-term state of high alert, says Robert H. Shmerling, clinic chief in the department of rheumatology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
It's often the chronic inflammation, not the viruses themselves, that causes much of the damage.
"Over time, inflammation damages healthy cells,” says Roma Pahwa, a researcher for the National Institutes of Health who specializes in the inflammatory response. Here's why: When cells are in distress, they release chemicals that alert the immune system. White blood cells then flood the scene, where they work to eat up bacteria, viruses, damaged cells and debris from an infection or injury. If the damage is too great, they call in backup cells known as neutrophils, which are the hand grenades of the immune system — they blow up everything in sight, healthy or not. Each neutrophil has a short life span, but in chronic inflammation, they continue to be sent in long after the real threat is gone, causing damage to the healthy tissue that remains. The inflammation can start attacking the linings of your arteries or intestines, the cells in your liver and brain, or the tissues of your muscles and joints. This inflammation-caused cellular damage can trigger diseases like diabetes, cancer, dementia, heart disease, arthritis and depression.
And because it's low grade, “its slow and secret nature makes it hard to diagnose in day-to-day life,” Pahwa says. “You have no idea it's even happening until those conditions show symptoms."
"It can be complicated to figure out if inflammation is friend or foe,” Pahwa says. Looking at the four main causes of chronic inflammation, however, sheds some light.
Unfortunately, yes. The older we are, the more exposure we've had to stuff like environmental toxins, stress, alcohol, bad foods and chronic diseases. Plus, aging makes it more difficult for our bodies to properly manage our immune systems, to extract nutrients from food and to shed extra pounds. “There are thousands of articles in the science literature related to aging and inflammation,” says Thomas Buford, an associate professor with the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine's division of gerontology.
Chronic inflammation is a cascading effect of reactions in the body, Pahwa says. Here's a (very) basic breakdown of what's going on.
Yes, and they're the same foods you've been warned about by everyone from your dentist to your cardiologist. (And that's no surprise, because gingivitis and sclerotic arteries are both inflammatory conditions.) Foods high in sugar or high in unhealthy fats (think deli meats and fried foods) are top of the list.
"We don't fully understand it yet,” Buford says, “but now we know our gut microbiome, made up of trillions of bacteria, influences physiologic processes throughout the body.” We're born with a balance between good and bad bacteria in the gut. When that balance is thrown off — known as dysbiosis — it can lead to trouble. “A disregulated microbiome has been associated with metabolic diseases, pulmonary diseases, nervous system conditions, Alzheimer's — and these associations grow as we learn more and more,” Buford says.
