Derek Burnett
Derek Burnett is a Contributing Writer at Bottom Line Personal, where he writes frequently on health and wellness. He is also a contributing editor with Reader’s Digest magazine.
Chronic inflammation is implicated in many of the most common diseases that affect Americans, including heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. Yet most of us have only a hazy understanding of what inflammation really is, and in fact medical researchers are still piecing together the inflammation picture and, through research, finding out more about it every day. Given the serious risks, it makes sense to wonder about chronic inflammation symptoms/treatment and how to give ourselves the best shot at minimizing inflammation so we can live healthier, longer lives.
When we try to define inflammation, most people reach for the word “swelling.” Swelling of tissue certainly is a component of inflammation, as you know if you’ve ever sprained an ankle or gotten a bee sting. When you have that kind of an injury, the swelling, reddening, and heating up of the tissue around the wound is quite noticeable. What you’re experiencing in such cases is acute inflammation. Acute inflammation usually lasts only a relatively short time before fading off as the injury begins to heal.
But have you ever stopped to wonder where this swelling phenomenon comes from? Acute inflammation stems from our immune system’s response to an injury. We usually think of our immune systems as helping us fight off diseases and respiratory infections, but the immune system is also activated when you bang your thumb with a hammer, get a sliver in your big toe, or pull a muscle in your leg playing pickleball. As soon as there is damage to tissue, protective cells are activated that rush to the site to wall off the injury, destroy potentially damaging infectious cells, and clear away dead or damaged tissue. Even though it can make the injury site feel tender and look ugly, an acute inflammatory response speeds healing.
But some injuries to our bodies are not overt, acute, and fleeting but rather hidden, chronic, and persistent. This results in another kind of inflammation called chronic inflammation, systemic inflammation, or low-level inflammation. For example, if you spend decades living in an area with low air quality, the tissues in your airway…and even possibly in other organs…can become inflamed as your blood transports particles throughout the body and your immune system responds to the irritants. If your body is constantly exposed to the irritating particles, the immune system is in a permanent state of activity, damaging otherwise healthy tissue in an effort to protect the body. In some conditions, the damage to surrounding tissue caused by those inflammatory compounds stimulates a new immune response and more inflammation, creating a cycle of injury and attempted healing.
The processes by which our immune systems combat foreign invaders are vastly complex, involving a bewildering cast of players with names such as mast cells, T cells, histamines, neutrophils, and mediators. But for simplicity’s sake, you can think of the immune response as occurring in two main stages.
We call the processes belonging to the first stage our “innate” immune system. Its star players are immune cells called phagocytes. Think of phagocytes as “the guys who go in first” in a military battle. When they encounter a threat, they surround the offending substance and essentially gobble it up. They then prepare the way for the second stage, called the “adaptive” immune system, by displaying bits of protein from the microbes they have just destroyed. This allows warriors called T Cells to recognize the invader for future reference. Besides merely identifying the threat, phagocytes also send an alarm that ushers in an army of immune cells to crush the enemy cells.
Unfortunately, long-term exposure to the natural chemicals released by the immune system can cause lasting damage to tissues. For example, the linings of blood vessels that have been subjected to inflammation for decades no longer look like a smooth road but rather like a highway filled with potholes. Similar changes can occur in the brain, the eyes, the heart, and other organs. While researchers are still figuring out exactly how these changes contribute to disease, it’s clear that there’s an association between inflammation and many serious conditions.
Physicians can detect how much inflammation is in the body by measuring in the bloodstream the presence of certain chemicals called “biomarkers” of inflammation. The most common such biomarker is called C-Reactive Protein, or CRP. In medical research examining the link between chronic inflammation and disease, CRP has been the biomarker most frequently used by researchers as an indicator of inflammation levels.
Talking about the signs and symptoms of chronic inflammation can be tricky for a couple reasons. First, there’s no single telltale symptom that’s exclusive to chronic inflammation. Instead, its symptoms resemble and overlap with those of many other conditions. And second, the visible signs of the diseases and conditions associated with chronic inflammation, which may be considered “downstream” symptoms of inflammation, are exceedingly varied. They include everything from diarrhea to loss of vision to wheezing to limb stiffness.
Possible symptoms associated with chronic inflammation include:
But to reiterate, any of these symptoms could be present in the absence of chronic inflammation. Conversely, a person could have chronic inflammation without experiencing any given one of these symptoms. Therefore, you should not assume that you don’t have chronic inflammation because you don’t have these symptoms. The only way to be sure is to be tested for inflammation biomarkers. In the meantime, do your best to prevent chronic inflammation by following a healthy lifestyle, which includes not smoking, drinking only sparingly, exercising regularly, getting plenty of sleep, and eating a diet rich in whole grains, fruits and vegetables while avoiding processed foods and saturated fats.
There is no current treatment for otherwise healthy people who have chronic inflammation. Instead, anti-inflammatory medications are sometimes given to people as specific treatments for inflammation-related diseases with which they’ve been diagnosed, such as eczema, asthma, or macular degeneration. These may include immunotherapy agents, steroids, biologic drugs, leukotriene inhibitors, and others.
While it might seem to make intuitive sense to take non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as ibuprofen or aspirin every day to prevent chronic inflammation, you should never do so unless instructed to by a doctor. NSAIDs come with the risk of serious side effects including stomach ulcers, bleeding, and heart attack.
