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Key to extending human lifespans lies in preventing chronic inflammation, research suggests, Dr. James Aw | February 26, 2014 Dr. James Aw is the medical director of the Medcan Clinic, a leading private health clinic in Toronto|

Excerpts:
"Why can some people smoke a pack a day and never get lung cancer? Why do 50% of the people who get heart attacks have normal levels of cholesterol? The emerging field of epigenomics is at the heart of the biggest mysteries in medicine."

"Last week, I was at a medical conference in New Orleans when I heard a talk by Dr. Muin J. Khoury, the director of public health genomics at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. Part of Khoury’s work involves epigenomics, or the interplay between environment and the body’s genes — why some people’s genes turn on in certain situations, while others do not.

Dr. Khoury’s research got me thinking about one of epigenomic’s most exciting frontiers: why some people are able to stay healthy until the age of 100 — and why others die of old age in their eighties.

Many researchers now believe the answer involves the body’s inflammatory response. Inflammation is one of the processes that is key to the body’s healing cycle. Think of what happens when a puck hits you in the face during a game of shinny. Your eye swells shut, and the tissue around it gets swollen and hot as the body goes into overdrive to repair the damage. Many things besides a hockey puck can trigger this inflammatory response — often it’s an infection. And once the body has fought off the infection, or repaired the damage, the inflammatory response is supposed to turn off."

"Research is showing that maintaining control over the body’s inflammatory response can help us to live longer"

"But as we get older, most of us grow worse at regulating the inflammatory response. We lapse into a state of chronic inflammation, or “inflamm-aging,” that isn’t precipitated by injury or disease. The body persists in an ongoing state of high alert, a bit like the multicoloured terrorist attack threat levels instituted by the U.S. Homeland Security Department. The inflamm-aging process sees cytokines, proteins the immune system typically uses to protect the body from harm, actually damaging the body’s ability to stay healthy — triggering aging"

"Removing ‘deadbeat’ cells that stop functioning but nevertheless continue to live may open the door to future treatments that extend lifespans in humans"


"Could a customized diet help regulate the chronic inflammatory response? And would that, in turn, help more people to live well to the age of 100?"

"Today, clinical medicine is beginning to harness and control the chronic inflammatory process. By testing levels in the blood of a substance called hsCRP, we can now assess whether a given patient is experiencing acute inflammation — and the future is likely to bring us more sophisticated testing of chronic inflammation with such biomarkers as interleukin, insulin growth factor and tumour necrosis factor."

Article at:
http://life.nationalpost.com/2014/02/26/dr-aw-key-to-extending-human-lifespans-and-slowing-aging-lies-in-preventing-treating-chronic-inflammation-in-the-body-research-suggests/