Covid-19 & Health Update: Inflammation Clock can Reveal Biological Age
Hey there everyone:
As you know, inflammation causes, aggravates, or perpetuates virtually every human illness. On top of that, inflammation is primarily an immune event, i.e., the immune system controls, coordinates and regulates virtually all the inflammatory processes that occur within us. Scientists are beginning to look at our inflammatory burden as one of the primary drivers of aging that can be measured. The more our non-purposeful inflammation is under control and well managed, the healthier we are and the longer we live. Purposeful inflammation is part of the process that keeps us healthy, and it waxes and wanes as needed and does not linger. For example, if we get a cut on our hand, it will turn red, get warm, swell, and hurt…the classical signs of purposeful inflammation because inflammation is the first component of all healing and repair. This inflammation will usually peak in several days and then gradually fade as the repair process progresses until things are resolved.
Non-purposeful inflammation is chronic and lingering long after the healing process has finished. It turns out that diet is a potent source of chronic inflammation, as well as background infections, toxin exposure, chronic stress chemistry, gut and digestive issues, hormone imbalances and more. It is this chronic low to moderate grade inflammation that becomes degenerative over time and leads to chronic illness. Here are some quotes from the two links below that are about the same paper:
“A new type of age ‘clock’ can assess chronic inflammation to predict whether someone is at risk of developing age-related disorders such as cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease. The clock measures ‘biological age’, which takes health into consideration and can be higher or lower than a person’s chronological age.
The inflammatory ageing clock (iAge), reported on 12 July in Nature Aging 1 , is one of the first tools of its kind to use inflammation to assess health…. The researchers who developed iAge hope that, because inflammation is treatable, the tool could help doctors determine who would benefit from intervention — potentially extending the number of years a person lives in good health.”
The study “is a further reinforcement of the fact that the immune system is critical, not only for predicting unhealthy ageing, but also as a mechanism driving it”, says Vishwa Deep Dixit, an immunobiologist at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, who was not involved in the work.
“iAge is based on the idea that as a person ages, their body experiences chronic, systemic inflammation because their cells become damaged and emit inflammation-causing molecules. This ultimately leads to wear and tear on their tissues and organs. People who have a healthy immune system will be able to neutralize this inflammation to some extent, whereas others will age faster.
Bottom Line: One of the key drivers of inflammation and aging is once again based on our food choices. All you have to do is to Google ‘anti-inflammatory diet’ to get thousands of hits. Read just a few of these and it becomes pretty clear what we all need to do: consume organic, unprocessed whole foods and avoid the rest.
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