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If All Roads Lead to Inflammation, How Do We Get to Health? in Forbes, Alice G. Walton, PhD in Biopsychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at CUNY's Graduate Center in New York City, 10/19/2011

Excerpts:
"Inflammation is a major buzzword in the health industry these days. It seems like all bad lifestyle choices lead to inflammation, and most inflammation leads to bad health outcomes. Eating too much, being sedentary, stressing out, and lacking sleep all apparently make one inflamed and more prone to disease. What, though, does inflammation actually mean, why is it bad for us, and how do we escape it?"

"The problems arise in the aftermath of inflammation – especially chronic inflammation – and our healthy cells can take the brunt. When the immune system kicks into gear, white blood cells and their byproducts can saturate a region and leave healthy tissue overwrought and stressed. Katz says that “our healthy tissues are potential collateral damage – victims of friendly fire – as the immune system does its job defending us from pathogens, and rogue cells. The term is descriptive, and derives more from observation than any genuine insights about physiology.”

In other words, it is difficult to know all the myriad events that are occurring in previously healthy tissue that has suffered the aftermath of inflammation, but the end product is not good.


To put it plainly, chronic inflammation can provide the framework for, if not outright cause, a lot of the major chronic disease states. Katz says that “inflammation – the actions of white blood cells, and the molecules they produce (including oxygen free radicals) – is directly implicated in the progression of most chronic diseases.” This isn’t dramatic, it’s intuitive, he says, because “the process is fundamental, just like oxidation. There are ‘final common pathways’ that unify all of the ways we, and our parts, can fail.”

So what are the diseases that all stem from inflammation? Some of the ones most people are aware are linked are heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and stroke. These diseases are all strongly connected to metabolic syndrome, a pesky intermingling of risk factors like being overweight (particularly having belly fat), being sedentary, and having high blood fats, blood pressure, and cholesterol. Inflammation seems to be the common denominator, possibly the result of the body being subject to these variables over many years.

Other diseases linked to inflammation are less obvious, but just as disturbing – like cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and, oddly, depression."

"While one’s risk for cancer comes in part from the genes, there is, for better or for worse, more to the picture than genes. The inflammatory status in the body, which can be the result of various lifestyle factors, has a lot to do with cancer risk. The cancer-inflammation connection could work in a variety of ways: one possibility is that an inflamed environment presents the opportunity for potentially cancerous cells to take root and grow. Some evidence has shown that certain immune cells are actually hijacked by cancer cells to become their partners in crime. Other studies have shown bacterial and viral infections are strongly linked to cancer; certain inflammatory diseases like crohn’s disease, also linked to bacterial infection, are known to increase one’s risk for cancer.
Not surprisingly, but unfortunately, inflammation can also affect the brain, and when it does, it seems to lead to some dire consequences. For example, Alzheimer’s disease develops when plaques accumulate in the brain and cannot be cleared away efficiently: it’s thought that the particles that are byproducts of inflammation are at least in part responsible for the formation of these plaques, and studies have shown that the markers of inflammation pepper the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.

Depression is another disorder that has recently been connected with brain inflammation. Some researchers have suggested that depression in an adaptive mechanism to address severe psychological stress. The brain responds to serious psychological assaults with inflammation, say the researchers, and depression becomes the brain’s ineffective, pathological attempt to quell it. Other studies have found that markers of inflammation are actually present more often in the brains of depressed people."

Article at:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/19/all-roads-lead-to-inflammation-so-can-we-ever-get-healthy/