4 ms·

>This topic is interesting to me for a few reasons... >Cognitive impairment has long been associated with inflammation in older adults: https://www.ncbi.nlm.ni

>This topic is interesting to me for a few reasons... >Cognitive impairment has long been associated with inflammation in older adults: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3390758/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3390758/ Once upon a time, when I was an itty bitty grad student, I had an appointment with an immunology PI to ask to be involved in their research. One of the first questions they asked me was, what's inflammation? "You want the layman's answer or the real answer?" "Both." "The layman's answer is that set of cellular and biochemical reactions involved with infections and their resolution." "And the real answer?" "There's no such thing. 'Inflammation' is the set of cellular and molecular biology that immunologists discovered before everyone else did. There isn't a single molecule in the body that isn't involved in a wide variety of functions, and there isn't a single function -be it extracellular remodeling, monitoring of cells for expression of abnormal proteins, cell signaling, cell life cycle regulation, etc. - that doesn't hook into a hundred different functions in a hundred different contexts. 'Inflammation' refers to the lens of the person studying the thing, not the thing." I got a happy smile and a welcome handshake with that answer. "Inflammation" as an explanation in medicine ranks alongside "Quantum Physics" as an explanation in everything else. When someone starts citing "quantum physics" for why anything, you can safely tune them out 99.99% of the time.

ufmace 7y ago
Well now that's interesting. A lot of medical/health/nutrition information these days seems to revolve around inflammation. Much of it is supposedly backed by studies (that I don't really have the time or understanding to dive into), but there's just so many things that supposedly cause it and are supposedly caused by it that I get the feeling that we don't really have any idea at all what it is and what it does. It's like it's some magic spell that is caused by whatever thing you're ideologically against, and causes basically everything you don't like.
- post_below 7y ago
  We do know a lot about it, though, much more, I'm assuming, than we did when the previous poster was a grad student. We know about different types of inflammation and the cellular processes involved, we know how it turns on and off, we know more about how it effects different systems and organs in the body. We can distinguish between short term and chronic inflammation and differentiate between types of inflammation that are beneficial and types that aren't. There are, of course, lots of articles and trends out there that over simplify and make unreasonable associations and leaps... the comparison to quantum mechanics is apt in that way. But irresponsible reporting doesn't invalidate the source. Our understanding is well beyond abstract at this point, despite how much we still don't know. The bulk of what we don't know outweighs what we do in most areas of biology.
  - arkades 7y ago
    OP went on to medical school after finishing that grad degree. We know a lot more about molecular biology. That we clump stuff under the header of "inflammation" is a categorization/naming issue, not a biology issue :)

ufmace 7y ago

Well now that's interesting. A lot of medical/health/nutrition information these days seems to revolve around inflammation. Much of it is supposedly backed by studies (that I don't really have the time or understanding to dive into), but there's just so many things that supposedly cause it and are supposedly caused by it that I get the feeling that we don't really have any idea at all what it is and what it does. It's like it's some magic spell that is caused by whatever thing you're ideologically against, and causes basically everything you don't like.

post_below 7y ago
We do know a lot about it, though, much more, I'm assuming, than we did when the previous poster was a grad student. We know about different types of inflammation and the cellular processes involved, we know how it turns on and off, we know more about how it effects different systems and organs in the body. We can distinguish between short term and chronic inflammation and differentiate between types of inflammation that are beneficial and types that aren't. There are, of course, lots of articles and trends out there that over simplify and make unreasonable associations and leaps... the comparison to quantum mechanics is apt in that way. But irresponsible reporting doesn't invalidate the source. Our understanding is well beyond abstract at this point, despite how much we still don't know. The bulk of what we don't know outweighs what we do in most areas of biology.
- arkades 7y ago
  OP went on to medical school after finishing that grad degree. We know a lot more about molecular biology. That we clump stuff under the header of "inflammation" is a categorization/naming issue, not a biology issue :)