The word inflammation can conjure up visuals of a swollen, red and throbbing knee. Conventional public wisdom frames inflammation as being adverse, painful and harmful — something most people want to resolve quickly with medication.
Inflammation, however, plays vital roles in our bodies, making our immune systems more responsive to injuries. Without inflammation, we would succumb rapidly to infection, be unable to heal from surgeries and injuries and develop diseases more frequently. Simply put, without inflammation, we would not survive.
Inflammation manifests itself in three main types: acute, chronic and life-threatening. It’s important to understand the differences between the three, how to identify them and how to treat them.
Keeping chronic inflammation lower can help improve your health over the long haul, and certain lifestyle changes may help you achieve this goal. In this guide, we’ll walk through the basics of chronic inflammation — what it is, what it can feel like and how to prevent inflammation.
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What Is Inflammation?
You might have heard about inflammation’s role in overall health, but what exactly is inflammation and how does it happen?
Acute inflammation
“Inflammation is the body’s response to something wrong,” explains Megan Wroe, wellness manager and registered dietitian at St. Jude Medical Center in Southern California. “When you get a paper cut, the area turns red and a bit swollen as the body initiates the healing process.”
The body’s inflammatory system is stimulated by a number of issues, such as pathogens, irritants and allergens. However, inflammation’s ultimate purpose is to heal. This type of inflammation is called acute inflammation.
“Through inflammation, our body’s immune system unleashes a powerful healing cascade that restores damaged tissues and promotes recovery,” says Lisa Jones, a registered dietitian based in Philadelphia. “Inflammation is like a superhero for our body, rushing to the rescue of damaged tissues and bringing in reinforcements to promote healing. Through the release of white blood cells, inflammation sets off a chain reaction of events that work together to defeat the infection and restore balance to the body.”
The pain and swelling that accompany this process can be uncomfortable, but they’re critical to healing and a sign that your immune system is working.
Treat acute inflammation by managing it, not trying to cure it. For the first 24 to 48 hours, follow the acronym RICE: Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation. You can take limited doses of a painkiller like ibuprofen, but do not exceed the recommended dose. Keep in mind that swelling and the pain you feel is designed to immobilize you so the injury can get the body to heal. Taking high doses of painkillers and other anti-inflammatories may actually prevent that nourishment and healing, leading to persistent pain and instability.
Life-threatening inflammation
When the body activates significantly more immune cells than it needs to overcome a new infection or damage that has widely disseminated throughout the blood stream, inflammation can overwhelm the affected site. This sometimes causes massive injury and even death.
During the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 to 1920, for example, most victims were healthy young adults whose immune systems responded with exceptional vigor to the virus; inflammation impaired their bodies so severely that they essentially drowned themselves. Sepsis is another example of this reaction, called a “cytokine storm.”
Recognizing the potential presence of infections that can cause life-threatening inflammation helps prevent it, and also helps prevent serious injury or death. Health care providers often use blood-testing to recognize a possible life-threatening inflammatory response early in patients.
You can also recognize if you may be suffering from life-threatening inflammation. If you’re taking medication that can suppress your immune system as a side effect, or to treat rheumatoid arthritis, you are more at risk. The same goes for people who have inflammatory bowel disease, are undergoing chemotherapy or had surgery within the last six weeks. In these cases, seek medical attention immediately if your temperature exceeds 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, or if you feel dizzy or experience a rapid heartbeat.
When caught early, doctors can overcome the life-threatening inflammation by treating the infection itself.
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Why Is Inflammation Bad?
Fundamentally, inflammation is a good thing. It’s how your immune system combats pathogens to help keep you healthy. However, inflammation that doesn’t subside can lead to the development of some long-term health conditions, including diabetes and heart disease.
Chronic Inflammation
Inflammation can be helpful as the body’s defense mechanism to heal injuries, but too much of a good thing can be problematic. Over time, the body may get less efficient at making inflammation subside, causing chronic inflammation, a condition of prolonged inflammation that lasts for several months to years.
“(Chronic) inflammation is detrimental to the body because it increases the rate at which our cells age,” says Dana Ellis Hunnes, a senior clinical dietitian at UCLA Medical Center and assistant professor at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
Chronic inflammation may cause some noticeable symptoms, such as muscle soreness, joint pain or stiffness or frequent rashes, but it often has no discernible symptoms. Chronic inflammation can linger long after the activating injury or disease has been resolved. According to 2019 research published in Nature Medicine, chronic inflammation has been linked to elevated risk for a variety of conditions, including:
— Stroke
— Diabetes
— Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease
— Cancer
— Neurodegenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia
Inflammation can also impact mental health and contribute to conditions, like depression and anxiety.
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What Causes Chronic Inflammation?
Certain lifestyle factors, specifically a poor inflammatory diet, may contribute to the development of chronic, low-grade inflammation, note researchers in a 2020 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. It boils down to how the body processes nutrients, such as protein, fat and carbohydrates and waste, which is excreted as a solid, a gas in the form of carbon dioxide or a liquid in the form of urine and sweat.
“After food is consumed, the body has no other choice than to digest both the good nutrients and the not-so-good nutrients,” explains Tracy Lockwood Beckerman, a registered dietitian based in New York City. “Good nutrients, like vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and phytonutrients, are shuttled to cells that carry these helpful nutrients to areas that need energy, repair and reinforcement.”
However, other ingredients that aren’t helpful can linger as the digestive system struggles to process them, creating harmful conditions that can damage cells within the body. These types of foods will signal the same inflammatory response that the body produces when it senses you’re injured or sick. For example, if you have a peanut allergy, exposure to peanuts creates an inflammatory response that in severe cases could turn deadly.
In addition, having a sedentary lifestyle, persistent stress and insomnia, smoking or exposure to environmental toxins can cause chronic inflammation. Conditions such as bone infection and gum disease also cause chronic inflammation.
While being overweight raises your risk of inflammation, your body fat distribution may be even more important. Fat cells that accumulate near organs in your abdominal cavity tend to behave like little factories, responding to stress hormones that you produce when you’re frazzled or overtired by pumping out chemicals of their own. The stress hormone cortisol appears to bind to receptors on these fat cells, setting off a process that promotes the storage of fat and increases the number of fat cells. These extra cells then produce more chemicals that increase inflammation.
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How to Test for Chronic Inflammation
There’s not a reliable blood test yet to screen for inflammation. A test that measures an inflammatory marker called C-reactive protein is currently recommended for those at increased risk of heart disease, because high levels of CRP are associated with future heart attacks and strokes. But it’s not used as a general screen because researchers still don’t know what role CRP plays and whether it’s truly a sign of increased risk of disease.
What’s the Best Way to Control Chronic Inflammation?
To fully control inflammation, it’s important to eat a balanced, plant-based diet that’s rich in vegetables, fruits, whole grains and healthy fats — aka an anti-inflammatory diet. You also need to get enough sleep, control stress, exercise, not smoke, manage your weight and drink plenty of water.
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What Is Chronic Inflammation? originally appeared on usnews.com
