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Why Does Inflammation Seem to Underlie All Sickness?
- rasengan 7y agoFighting inflammation has worked out much better for me than targeting any specific type of issue. As an example, bromelain, curbs sinus inflammation which reduces the number of sinus infections in some people.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ferros 7y agoInteresting to learn that inflammation is just like saying cancer. While the different types share the same base descriptor, they can be entirely different things.
- dghughes 7y agoOddly so is the word fish there is no ocean creature that is a "fish" each is vastly different. It would be like referring to everything not in the ocean by a single name like "terreseta". Even though a camel and a snake are vastly different.
- zby 7y agoThe article does not really support the implicit thesis from the title - it lists some diseases that are caused by bad inflamation, some items are maybe surprising - but it does not mention diseases that obviously have different causes like infections. Overall clickbait with no content.
- twic 7y agoEven in infections, it can be the inflammatory response which causes the damage. I had myocarditis following a flu infection, but it wasn't the influenza virus that screwed up my heart muscle, it was the white blood cells going apeshit trying to kill it.
- im3w1l 7y agoIf someone pushes you, and you start swinging your arms wildly to balance yourself, but end up falling in a different direction - why did you fall?
- humbledrone 7y agoHow hard did they push you? If they shoved you with only a micronewton if force and you fell, it's probably the fault of your overreaction.
- mhluongo 7y agoIf you took falling lessons as a kid, and you knew how to properly respond- following the push to a controlled fall, roll, or other redirection- you'd be fine. Sometimes the overreaction is the problem.
- nitrogen 7y agoWhat are falling lessons? Judo?
- scns 7y agoJudo is good for learning to fall, otherwise not that much IMO.
- huherto 7y agoI disagree. I was by far the smallest kid in my grade, but I took a couple of years of judo when I was 7. It was really useful as I grew up. A big equalizer for me. It does give you an intuitive sense of how to move and a shift your weight in your favor. Even if you fall, you end up falling on top of the other kid. As an adult and for personal defense I think Judo comes right after BJJ and wrestling.
- emmelaich 7y ago
- Iamliesa 7y agoInfection actually also leads to inflammation, it's just a different kind. There is acute inflammation and chronic inflammation. Acute inflammation is good as it leads to your body healing. However, if the inflammation doesn't subside, that's when inflammation becomes chronic and eventually, disease occurs.
- aszantu 7y agoDave feldmans theory was very intriguing. Haven't read the article cuz of sign in. But the idea was that inflammation, for example cholesterol is transporting energy to any place where it's needed. If you have a cut the body activates inflammation and the cholesterol is taking fat and protein to the place where it's needed.
- api 7y agoIsn't it part of the body's response to sickness? Why does screaming tend to underlie all stabbings?
- ianai 7y agoScreaming doesn’t worsen stabbing wounds, directly. But inflammation does often (in all the examples I’ve read) worsen the triggering illness.
- huffmsa 7y agoChronic inflammation worsens chronic illness. Acute inflammation is generally good. Ice should only be applied when the swelling is cutting off blood flow
- catoc 7y agoAcute inflammation severely increases damage after moderately severe ischemic stroke [in rats], which can be prevented by blocking the acute inflammatory response. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5257154_Interferon-Beta_Prevents_Cytokine-Induced_Neutrophil_Infiltration_and_Attenuates_Blood-Brain_Barrier_Disruption https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5257154_Interferon-...
- manmal 7y agoIce baths seem to speed up recovery after exercise. But, the mechanisms by which this works are likely not limited to stopping inflammation.
- rjzzleep 7y agoI see a reference to cancer below, I recently started looking into this, it's actually fascination. There is actually some research being done on non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs such as celecoxib or diclofenac for treatment of leukemia. Since Leukemia is actually related to an increase of white blood cells which are produced in response to inflammation/infection I was curious if there's any relationship and immediately found articles such as the following one: "Celecoxib suppresses autophagy and enhances cytotoxicity of imatinib in imatinib-resistant chronic myeloid leukemia cells" There's also a bunch of initial research on herbal medicinal herbs and their effect on certain cancer cells. And a lot of them actually were used for their anti-inflammatory properties. (Personal matter related to a case I have in the family) [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5029099/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5029099/ [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4720497/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4720497/ [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0023643803002147 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002364380...
- gzer0 7y agoIt is important to look at the overall body of research available on the matter. What you have linked has no placebo-arm to compare to. In addition, only cells from 6 patients were tested. Furthermore, this is for extremely resistant CML patients who do not respond to imatinib (first line treatment). However, the introduction of second generation TKI inhibitors is now the standard of care in imatinib resistant CML patients. I haven’t referenced any particular pubmed entries since there are 6 or 7 second gen TKI’s, however, this reference by the American cancer society gives a good summary of available options. [1] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/chronic-myeloid-leukemia/treating/targeted-therapies.html https://www.cancer.org/cancer/chronic-myeloid-leukemia/treat...
- akeck 7y agoAlso, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/dec/30/children-leukaemia-mel-greaves-microbes-protection-against-disease https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/dec/30/children-leu...
- derefr 7y agoThere’s a thing called the “Cell Danger Response”, where individual cells react to detecting danger to themselves in a somewhat selfish way, by inflaming and emitting purines (the chemicals cells also release when they lyse apart during apoptosis.) By the fact that other cells detect danger using these purines, this response is usually cascading in a local area. It lasts a long time; sometimes cells just never go out of this “red alert” mode once in it, because they’ve isolated themselves well-enough that they can never perceive the environment again to see that it’s all-clear. This Cell Danger Response is thought to be responsible for some large amount of the “harmful” inflammatory response in our bodies. It is being suggested as a cause for syndromes as widely-ranging as metabolic syndrome and autistic spectrum disorders. (Not because it seems like a neat fit; but rather, because experiments to fix/disable CDR in tissues seem to ameliorate the symptoms of this cornucopia of syndromes/disorders!) The Cell Danger Response is “selfish” because it protects the cell itself from onslaught, but it hinders higher-level functions of the body from eliminating the problem that is causing the cell to react in the first place. The CDR is a bit like when people run screaming to the exits of a building when a fire breaks out: an individually-useful strategy if you don’t know the context you’re in, maybe, but very suboptimal from a bird’s eye view of people being jammed together and trampled upon. The CDR is very much the way you’d expect cells to react to threat if they were independent unicellular organisms within a colony, rather than cells in a multicellular organism. And, given what we know of the evolutionary history of multicellular life, we might very well have some highly-conserved DNA coding for organism-level responses by individual cells, retained from an era when our cells were their own organisms. The important thing to realize is that these responses aren’t what the body “wants” in a global sense. They’re optimal for the cells in some game-theoretic way, maybe, but—given that you have a nervous system, and an immune system, and a few other things that all link up to let your body know where damage is and send a lot of just the right type of cell there to fix or fight that damage—the CDR is more harmful than it is helpful. Our immune systems don’t complement it; they obviate it, and its lingering presence actively impedes the immune system’s work. The immune system has its own methods of triggering tissue inflammation, entirely separate from the CDR, and it only deploys these when there’s a global, top-down reason to do so. Picture our immune system as security in a mall, trying to get people to file orderly out of the mall during a fire, and you won’t be far off. Their job would be a lot easier—and more successful!—if the people didn’t freak out and run randomly away from the fire, but instead just kept about their business apart from following announcements to head toward specific areas of refuge at a measured pace. And while this “human danger response” might be a bad trigger of an otherwise-sensible response to fear, that is useful in more situations than not, the CDR is—as far as we know—useless and counterproductive in 100% of the kinds of dangerous situations cells will encounter in the context of a multicellular organism. (Okay, the CDR might be advantageous outside the body, like if you’re a spermatozoa or spore. It also might be advantageous if you’re a [live] cell in direct contact with the environment, without dead tissue or mucous in the way. But that’s actually really rare in higher animals!) ——— And that’s just the least useful inflammatory response our bodies have. We also have a bodily-level whole-immune-system response to suspected parasitic onslaught, that’s pretty counterproductive now that we have a super-bodily-level response to parasites involving bathrooms and hand-washing and food-washing and anti-parasitic drugs. The parasite immune response serves as a useful contrast to the CDR: while the parasite immune response would become helpful again in the event of a cataclysm that sent humans back to the Stone Age, the CDR would still be counterproductive for us even then. The CDR would only “become useful” for human cells that regress all the way back to being unicellular life-forms. (Sort of like the HeLa cancer cell line.)
- bfieidhbrjr 7y agoBecause we pretty much solved all the acute illnesses so we are left with self-inflicted chronic conditions. Pretty much all non-genetic chronic conditions are a result of diet and exercise. You can drastically reduce your chances of cancer, stroke, heart attack, alzeihmers, T2 diabetes, Parkinson’s.... you name it, with diet and exercise. You can even cure most of them with diet and exercise. I’ll be downvoted to oblivion, but you should know that illness is a choice.
- programmarchy 7y agoRelated to this, I saw an interesting graph where money spent on food is inversely correlated to money spent on health care. So spending more to eat healthier food will save you money on health care in the future. Or you can eat cheap food and accumulate health debt.
- ianai 7y agoProbably have to separate out any restaurant dining in that calculation. There’s a nonlinear relationship going on there.
- dominotw 7y ago> I saw an interesting graph where money spent on food is inversely correlated to money spent on health care. I would really like to see this graph to justify my own addiction to whole foods and shop there with less guilt.
- emmelaich 7y agoOne quote I've seen is that the only difference between food and medicine is dosage.
- coldtea 7y agoWhat people forget is that not all choice is equally easy. The choice to "diet and exercise" is easier for a rich guy with a personal chef and trainer. It's much more difficult for a poorer person working 2 stressful jobs, having to go back in a home late in the day exhausted and deal with whatever family/personal issues lurking around. And while there's a spectrum between one and the other extreme, more lower middle class, working class people are closer to the second case. (And there are circumstances in the first case, like stress, addiction, psychological history, that can make it hard to diet/exercise, even if you could easily afford a personal chef/trainer). So, yeah, it's a choice. But what (budgetary, stress-wise, family, expert, time, etc) support a person has in making that choice and sticking to it is not the same in all case, and can vary widely pro and against.
- namenotrequired 7y agoCould it have to do with early humans being scavengers? I heard there is some scientific support for this hypothesis, and I can imagine this may have had a profound (and evolutionarily recent) effect on our immune system. Could someone with more expertise shed a light?
- _bxg1 7y agoIt's perfectly intuitive to me. Taking things further, anxiety could be seen as inflammation of the mind and social unrest as inflammation of a society. Each, in the right amount, serves as an important corrective mechanism for dealing with threats. But in excess, each becomes a gradually destructive force. Anxiety and physical inflammation are even directly correlated, and social unrest and anxiety probably are too.
- scns 7y agoAnxiety looks to me more like an allergy of the mind: a useful survival system that does not have much to do in our safe environment and overreacts on perceived threats which are actually harmless.
- polynomial 7y agoYeah I don't know that sounds entirely too logical.
- journalctl 7y agoBecause it’s not. It tries to make biological truth out of an analogy.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoI have a remissive disease that I've only had a few flare ups in my life, all took a few months to get through and all triggered by highly stressful points in my life. Luckily my docs figured it out and prescribed medicine and I haven't had one since, but there is very much a tie between the immune (and inflammation) system and the mind. I don't think it's as mystical as the hippie crystal pushers claim, but it is most definitely there.
- kzrdude 7y agoBecause we haven't learned to treat systemic diseases yet, where more than one factor needs to be shut down or modified to stop the progress.
- sershe 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... I guess the grammar would need to be fixed, but otherwise it still works great!
- quickthrower2 7y agoIs a paywall work around available?
- rednerrus 7y agoIncognito mode.
- rubicon33 7y agoArticle is lacking in substance. It's conclusion is basically that there are two types of inflammation - one designed to attack parasites (worms, etc.) the other to attack bacteria and viruses. The theory it proposes is that because humans have basically eradicated parasitic infections, that part of the body becomes over active and leads to autoimmune disorders. 0 link to sources. I've never heard of this "dual inflammation system". Not saying it's false, just saying, show me the research. Further, show the research that somehow links the under-activity of one to full blown autoimmune disorders. Seems like a weak link.
- jhbadger 7y agoThis is all pretty standard textbook immunology. Providing sources would be a bit like citing Newton when mentioning gravity. In the innate (first responder) system, inflammation is used as a first line of defense (which can also be detrimental), but the mechanism used depends on the target. White blood cells called eosinophils largely respond to macroparasites like worms (although they also play a secondary role in viral infection). Bacteria and fungi are largely dealt with a different cell type, neutrophils, and virus infected cells by natural killer (NK) cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eosinophil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eosinophil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrophil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrophil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_killer_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_killer_cell
- ramraj07 7y agoNot just what the other reply said (standard immunology), this proposed theory itself is fairly standard - most immunologists would at least agree that our immune system is whack because we've eliminated parasites; they'll disagree only on the degree of importance of this particular fadotr
- emmelaich 7y agoTo reinforce the other repliers; people including doctors have deliberately infested themselves with hookworms to combat allergies. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy > Helminthic therapy, an experimental type of immunotherapy, is the treatment of autoimmune diseases and immune disorders by means of deliberate infestation with a helminth or with the eggs of a helminth. Helminths are parasitic worms such as hookworms, whipworms, and threadworms that have evolved to live within a host organism on which they rely for nutrients.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoCorrelation is not causation. My best understanding is that inflammation is a two street: It both promotes health problems and is, itself, caused by health issues. Until we have a clearer handle on this dynamic, we are kind of stuck in our current "Jim, don't leave him in the hands of twentieth century medicine!" morass.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jniedrauer 7y agoNot all inflammation is bad. Supercompensation can't happen without it. In fact, taking anti-inflammatory substances during training can reduce the efficacy of training[0]. [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5023714/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5023714/
- bamboozled 7y agoThanks I’ve actually wondered about this for sometime!
- pombrand 7y agoIt depends, there are several different form of inflammation. Curcumin seems to have little effect on muscle growth post exercise.
- jniedrauer 7y agoDo you happen to have a source for this? I've been avoiding turmeric after lifting for this very reason.
- libraryatnight 7y agoWould this include foods that are naturally anti-inflammatory? Or are those minor in normal/healthy amounts and thus not detrimental to training?
- ummonk 7y agoWhy does pain seem to underlie all sickness? Inflammation is likewise usually a symptom, not the cause. And in the case of muscular injuries, it is generally helpful to the healing process. The kind of imbalance mentioned in the article isn't really a culprit in most instances of sickness.
- known 7y agoInflammation can be a result of heart disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...
- sbmthakur 7y agohttps://outline.com/BXdFKX https://outline.com/BXdFKX
- Iamliesa 7y agoEvery disease has some agent that causes inflammation. As already mentioned, not all inflammation is bad. Acute inflammation helps the body eliminate the agent and thus heal. When you're talking about inflammation that underlies all sickness, you're talking about chronic inflammation. This occurs when inflammation doesn't subside which leads to your body attacking itself. This is such an interesting topic. I've actually just written an article about leading diseases that are caused by inflammation, if you're interested: https://www.iamliesa.com/inflammatory-diseases-inflammation https://www.iamliesa.com/inflammatory-diseases-inflammation