8 ms·

Why is inflammation a dangerous necessity?

118 points by digital55 4y ago

The_rationalist 4y ago
An open question would be wether the baseline inflammation level could be lowered if we implemented a periodic but rarer higher inflammatory level. So a ~flatline vs a sinusoid. It could be pharmacologically simulated.
- hirundo 4y ago
  Hormesis and the hygiene hypothesis suggest that "working out" can be good for the immune system too. Unfortunately variolation has become a difficult topic.
  - The_rationalist 4y ago
    I don't think doing exercise trigger an inflammatory (immune) response although I might be wrong. Either way your point stand regarding its paradoxical effect on oxidative stress.
    - epgui 4y ago
      Exercise does trigger inflammation through a variety of mechanisms (eg.: increased tissue perfusion and diapedesis, oxidative stress, tissue damage...). However it also releases endocannabinoids, which are anti-inflammatory, and causes a host of metabolic changes which are also anti-inflammatory. The overall effect of exercise is to increase inflammation acutely, and to decrease it chronically. Regular physical exercise is overall more modulatory than inflammatory.
- dashmeet 4y ago
  Sounds like exercise or maybe a dry sauna would be a cost effective non pharmaceutical way, short term increase in inflammation that results in a long term decrease in inflammation. Same thing with injuries and fractures but that’s more unrelated.
- epgui 4y ago
  The basal inflammation level is in fact in large part periodic due to the cortisol cycle.
- andreareina 4y ago
  I don't think I've seen any serious suggestions that inflammation per se causes beneficial adaptations. Rather, <some activity> imposes a stress and the recovery/adaption process is mediated by inflammation, i.e. the why of the inflammation is important.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- toshk 4y ago
  Somewhat related to your idea, they seem to have some success with parasitic therapy with things like Crone. Introduce a "harmless" parasite (worm) and the body's immunesystem to trigger it. Not sure how long they keep it in the body, seems to be mostly for a longer time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy
treeman79 4y ago
Fun fact. Many autoimmune issues can be triggered / worsened by diet. There is an auto immune protocol diet that is all about reducing inflammation. Spend a few months on any of the support forms and you’ll see a pattern where people take years to be diagnosed. Most have a mystery illness for several years before it’s diagnosed. Then they go through years of various medication options with mixed results. Eventually many end up going to diet as a solution. Many of the various low sugar tend to be fairly close. So a lot of people dealing with autoimmune via diet without realizing it.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  I was on the AIP diet for a while, quite a long time ago. It wasn't the end-all solution for me that others proclaimed it was, but it was nice to have something new to try.
  - urban_strike 4y ago
    For what it's worth, I had a similar experience trying a strict AIP diet for a few months - some improvements in my autoimmune symptoms (some psorasis I've had since childhood), but nothing definitive. When I tried a strict carnviore diet, basically cutting out the vegetable and fruits allowed on AIP, my existing patches of psoriasis disappeared over a few weeks, and no new ones appeared. Since then I've gone on and off of strict carnivore, but anytime I reintroduce vegetables and/or some other carb sources, I'll start to see new patches of psoriasis pop back up within a 2 or 3 weeks usually. So I usually balance on that line now, returning to carnivore if my symptoms start to bother me too much.
    - treeman79 4y ago
      I’ve heard this a few times. I’ve tried all meat before and I get crazy weak. If I recall my pain level dropped a lot though. Maybe because not eating enough meat. My wife gets crazy energetic, all her pain goes away and she’s way happier.
- WaxedChewbacca 4y ago
kzrdude 4y ago
Ah, this wakes me up to the new The Joy of Why podcast. I was already following The Joy of X.
jnsaff2 4y ago
I would heartily recommend Immune by Dettmer [0] if you are interested in how your immune system works. Fascinating read. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57423646-immune https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57423646-immune
- randycupertino 4y ago
  Immunology Made Ridiculously Simple is also fantastic for clinicians and people who like dumb medical jokes and cartoons :) https://www.amazon.com/Immunology-Ridiculously-Simple-Massoud-Mahmoudi/dp/0940780895 https://www.amazon.com/Immunology-Ridiculously-Simple-Massou... The entire "made ridiculously simple" series is fantastic, it's run by a retired MD professor who basically drew cartoons to help learn on his way through med school and throughout his career as a professor.
- pluppen 4y ago
  I just finished reading it and it was awesome. It's a great book for starting to understand the immune system.
zby 4y ago
I think we need to let go the paradigm that there is a 'good health' state and that we just need to avoid stuff that leads to deviation from that state. We keep discovering that a thing is correlated with one bad symptom - but the lack of said thing is correlated with a different bad symptom and we believe that there is one perfect level that thing that would let us live with neither of these bad things. There probably isn't. It probably used to be a good abstraction - because we had so many things that obviously harmed us so we tended to remove them from our lives and that was improvement. But now in the developed countries we live in an environment that is mostly cleaned from these obviously harmful things - what is left is all the exceptions.
- Hedepig 4y ago
  Perhaps slightly tangential - I listened to a set of lectures on genetics[0], one of the biggest takeaways for me was that although it's apparent diet is one of the largest[1] (I forget if it is the largest) factors in cancer rates, we aren't sure which foods in particular cause dramatic increases or decreases in cancer probability [0] - https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/understanding-genetics-dna-genes-and-their-real-world-applications.html https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/understanding-geneti... [1] - we believe it is a large factor due to the fact migrants adopt the same cancer rate when they join the native population
  - kritiko 4y ago
    I thought we had some ideas - e.g. high sodium diets in east asia have been implicated in gastric cancers.
- jack_pp 4y ago
  > But now in the developed countries we live in an environment that is mostly cleaned from these obviously harmful things I don't agree, sugar is still as popular as ever and age old marketing scams like fruit smoothies being healthy still dominate the health narrative. People continue binging pizza and burgers and wash it down with soda even though they know it's obviously bad for them. Obesity is a big problem in the west

118 points by digital55 4y ago

An open question would be wether the baseline inflammation level could be lowered if we implemented a periodic but rarer higher inflammatory level. So a ~flatline vs a sinusoid. It could be pharmacologically simulated.

hirundo 4y ago
Hormesis and the hygiene hypothesis suggest that "working out" can be good for the immune system too. Unfortunately variolation has become a difficult topic.
- The_rationalist 4y ago
  I don't think doing exercise trigger an inflammatory (immune) response although I might be wrong. Either way your point stand regarding its paradoxical effect on oxidative stress.
  - epgui 4y ago
    Exercise does trigger inflammation through a variety of mechanisms (eg.: increased tissue perfusion and diapedesis, oxidative stress, tissue damage...). However it also releases endocannabinoids, which are anti-inflammatory, and causes a host of metabolic changes which are also anti-inflammatory. The overall effect of exercise is to increase inflammation acutely, and to decrease it chronically. Regular physical exercise is overall more modulatory than inflammatory.
dashmeet 4y ago
Sounds like exercise or maybe a dry sauna would be a cost effective non pharmaceutical way, short term increase in inflammation that results in a long term decrease in inflammation. Same thing with injuries and fractures but that’s more unrelated.
epgui 4y ago
The basal inflammation level is in fact in large part periodic due to the cortisol cycle.
andreareina 4y ago
I don't think I've seen any serious suggestions that inflammation per se causes beneficial adaptations. Rather, <some activity> imposes a stress and the recovery/adaption process is mediated by inflammation, i.e. the why of the inflammation is important.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
toshk 4y ago
Somewhat related to your idea, they seem to have some success with parasitic therapy with things like Crone. Introduce a "harmless" parasite (worm) and the body's immunesystem to trigger it. Not sure how long they keep it in the body, seems to be mostly for a longer time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy

treeman79 4y ago

Fun fact. Many autoimmune issues can be triggered / worsened by diet. There is an auto immune protocol diet that is all about reducing inflammation. Spend a few months on any of the support forms and you’ll see a pattern where people take years to be diagnosed. Most have a mystery illness for several years before it’s diagnosed. Then they go through years of various medication options with mixed results. Eventually many end up going to diet as a solution. Many of the various low sugar tend to be fairly close. So a lot of people dealing with autoimmune via diet without realizing it.

themodelplumber 4y ago
I was on the AIP diet for a while, quite a long time ago. It wasn't the end-all solution for me that others proclaimed it was, but it was nice to have something new to try.
- urban_strike 4y ago
  For what it's worth, I had a similar experience trying a strict AIP diet for a few months - some improvements in my autoimmune symptoms (some psorasis I've had since childhood), but nothing definitive. When I tried a strict carnviore diet, basically cutting out the vegetable and fruits allowed on AIP, my existing patches of psoriasis disappeared over a few weeks, and no new ones appeared. Since then I've gone on and off of strict carnivore, but anytime I reintroduce vegetables and/or some other carb sources, I'll start to see new patches of psoriasis pop back up within a 2 or 3 weeks usually. So I usually balance on that line now, returning to carnivore if my symptoms start to bother me too much.
  - treeman79 4y ago
    I’ve heard this a few times. I’ve tried all meat before and I get crazy weak. If I recall my pain level dropped a lot though. Maybe because not eating enough meat. My wife gets crazy energetic, all her pain goes away and she’s way happier.
WaxedChewbacca 4y ago

kzrdude 4y ago

Ah, this wakes me up to the new The Joy of Why podcast. I was already following The Joy of X.

jnsaff2 4y ago

I would heartily recommend Immune by Dettmer [0] if you are interested in how your immune system works. Fascinating read. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57423646-immune https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57423646-immune

randycupertino 4y ago
Immunology Made Ridiculously Simple is also fantastic for clinicians and people who like dumb medical jokes and cartoons :) https://www.amazon.com/Immunology-Ridiculously-Simple-Massoud-Mahmoudi/dp/0940780895 https://www.amazon.com/Immunology-Ridiculously-Simple-Massou... The entire "made ridiculously simple" series is fantastic, it's run by a retired MD professor who basically drew cartoons to help learn on his way through med school and throughout his career as a professor.
pluppen 4y ago
I just finished reading it and it was awesome. It's a great book for starting to understand the immune system.

zby 4y ago

I think we need to let go the paradigm that there is a 'good health' state and that we just need to avoid stuff that leads to deviation from that state. We keep discovering that a thing is correlated with one bad symptom - but the lack of said thing is correlated with a different bad symptom and we believe that there is one perfect level that thing that would let us live with neither of these bad things. There probably isn't. It probably used to be a good abstraction - because we had so many things that obviously harmed us so we tended to remove them from our lives and that was improvement. But now in the developed countries we live in an environment that is mostly cleaned from these obviously harmful things - what is left is all the exceptions.

Hedepig 4y ago
Perhaps slightly tangential - I listened to a set of lectures on genetics[0], one of the biggest takeaways for me was that although it's apparent diet is one of the largest[1] (I forget if it is the largest) factors in cancer rates, we aren't sure which foods in particular cause dramatic increases or decreases in cancer probability [0] - https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/understanding-genetics-dna-genes-and-their-real-world-applications.html https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/understanding-geneti... [1] - we believe it is a large factor due to the fact migrants adopt the same cancer rate when they join the native population
- kritiko 4y ago
  I thought we had some ideas - e.g. high sodium diets in east asia have been implicated in gastric cancers.
jack_pp 4y ago
> But now in the developed countries we live in an environment that is mostly cleaned from these obviously harmful things I don't agree, sugar is still as popular as ever and age old marketing scams like fruit smoothies being healthy still dominate the health narrative. People continue binging pizza and burgers and wash it down with soda even though they know it's obviously bad for them. Obesity is a big problem in the west