Red, Hot, Painful, and Dangerous

Inflammation is a good thing and it works really hard to keep us healthy. Whenever we are hurt or infected it comes to the rescue kicking the intruders butt and stays around afterwards to help our tissues repair. However, like all good things too much can be a bad thing.

Our hero inflammation might actually be hurting us. Metabolic syndrome- loosely defined has having three of the five components: obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, insulin resistance, and atherosclerosis- appears to be partly caused by inflammation. All of the evidence points to inflammation.

Lets take a step back and be health detectives for a second. We know inflammation is designed to be good for us and obviously does not cause obesity so how is such a good thing involved in such a bad syndrome? A few of the best theories are as follows:

1) Obesity causes increased adiposity. In the obese state the adipocytes produce proinflammatory adipokines that cause insulin resistance as a means to put themselves on a diet. These adipokines along with increased numbers of M1 macrophages in the adiposity are responsible for increased systemic inflammation causing atherosclerosis and other bad things.

2) Inflammation causes insulin resistance as a means to provide the immune system with more energy during a pathogenic assault. Extrapolating from this statement I assume the following; this mechanism was under selective pressure and through divergence the acute insulin resistance became synonymous with acute pathogenic assault (like an alarm) and thus acute inflammation. During times of increased glucose levels the body gets confused and thinks it is under attack and causes insulin resistance even if the immunocompetent cells do not need extra energy.

3) Obesity increases lipolysis releasing Free Fatty Acids into the blood stream. Free Fatty Acids bind to TLRs causing cytokine release resulting in systemic inflammation.

These are just a few that I thought explained how a good thing can accidentally do bad things. Maybe inflammation is still our hero after all and it is trying to keep us healthy even if we are not. Maybe our bad lifestyle choices are what is really causing metabolic syndrome and inflammation is just getting a bad rap.

-Randy. I read 12 additional articles to find this information which also happens to be the number of beers Dr. Zoe Cohen has after 495k. Just kidding we all know Dr. Cohen probably rides her bicycle for 12 miles after class.

P.S. CRP was once especially useful for measuring acute inflammation because of a cheap, easy, and inexpensive laboratory technique. Take a plasma sample, if the subject has acute inflammation CRP in the sample will slow the sedimentation rate. So with some experience one can tell if a subject has acute inflammation based on if their plasma sedimentation’s rate is slower or faster.