INFLAMMATION 101

Decoding the importance and potential harm of inflammation to your health

UNDERSTANDING INFLAMMATION

While inflammation helps the body fight off serious threats and illnesses, it can be debilitating in excess. Here’s a guide to the ins and outs. Ashley Abramson

Say you’re on a walk and you trip over an uneven section of pavement. By the time you hobble home, your ankle doesn’t just hurt, it’s also red and swollen, and you can hardly move it. Debilitating as these classic inflammation symptoms can be, your bright red, puffy foot is actually a good sign. Your body is working on healing your injury. This is just one instance of inflammation. To understand inflammation, the good, the bad and the ugly, and how to deal with it, read on.

What Triggers It?

The National Institute of Health (NIH) classifies inflammation as your immune system’s response to an irritant from an everyday injury to a serious infection and everything in between. Infection from a virus or bacteria is one of the most common inflammation triggers. If you come down with a flu-like virus, for example, you’d feel miserable for two reasons, your respiratory symptoms, like a runny nose, cough, and shortness of breath, stem from the infection itself. But muscle aches and fever? As pesky as those flu by-products are, they’re also hallmark symptoms of systemic inflammation and an encouraging sign that your immune system is working properly to fight off the virus.

What’s going on beneath the surface? According to the NIH, when acute inflammation happens in the body, your immune system starts working hard to produce the cells and hormones it needs to heal your infection. Some of those cells dilate your blood vessels to allow more blood and immune system cells to get to the affected area.

Fever is also part of that response, as a higher body temperature helps make the body a less favorable environment for viruses and bacteria to replicate.

Inflammation also occurs locally, due to injuries and other irritants. Pain and swelling from a sprained ankle or pulled muscle are common signs of an inflammatory response. But it’s not just big injuries. Ever notice how your entire finger can turn pink from a tiny ingrown nail or splinter or how your lip swells when you accidently cut it? That’s inflammation, too. Your body responds to injury by sending molecules like white blood cells and platelets, which aggravate the injured area and draw in other chemicals, to start the repair process. As pesky as these symptoms are, they’re also a key part of staying healthy. “Nature invented inflammation as a life-sustaining, necessary process,” says Cornelia Weyand, M.D. Anytime we become infected or injured and have to regenerate tissue, inflammation is the mechanism that does it for us.

Usually, the immune system finishes its job, resolving the injury or infection and along with it, the inflammation. But in some cases, inflammation can be too powerful, go on too long, or target the wrong place at the wrong time. This type of response is considered “bad” inflammation and it can have significant health consequences.

When is it “Bad”?

Too much of a good thing can be harmful, including inflammation. Instead of helping you heal, an over active immune system can set the stage for chronic and even life-threatening conditions, including one known by some medical expertise as a cytokine storm. When the body IS overwhelmed by an infection, the immune response sometimes works too hard to protect itself. According to a 2020 paper in the Lancet journal, the overproduction of inflammatory proteins called cytokines can result in potentially fatal multi-organ shutdown. In normal circumstances , cytokines are produced and dispatched in an orderly fashion to meet the specific challenges of a pathogen, to the exact place where they need to go. If the body is overwhelmed with danger that inflammation can become so aggressive that it is life-threatening.

According to Dr. Weyand, it’s normal for inflammation to increase as people get older. It’s possible, she says, that an age-related decline in function of someone’s protective inflammation could trigger heightened “bad” inflammation if the body can’t effectively deal with irritants, injuries, and infection, then the ongoing inflammation response won’t turn off. That’s one reason why older people get all kinds of health problems.