Anti Aging

Inflammation Accelerates Aging: What You Need To Know

The inflammatory system goes into battle, helping shield us from invaders. But collateral damage
results from the fight. Literature is beginning to mount on how silent inflammation is the underlying
cause of most chronic diseases, such as obesity, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s.
According to a December 4, 2007 Discover magazine article by Kathleen McGowan—entitled “Can
We Cure Aging?”—gerontologists in recent years “have overturned much of the conventional wisdom
about getting old.” They now realize that aging “is actually something our own bodies create, a side
effect of the essential inflammatory system that protects us against infectious disease . . . as we fight off
invaders, we inflict massive collateral damage on ourselves, poisoning our own organs and breaking
down our own tissues. We are our own worst enemy.”
The question now becomes whether we wish to manage our aging by controlling our inflammatory
system to live better or ignore it and reap the consequences.
Prevention through prediction. The focus is rethinking our views on diseases, what they are and
where they come from. The fact is that left unchecked, the inflammatory system eventually “runs out of
bounds and damages organs throughout the body.”
“Inflammatory factors predict virtually all bad outcomes in humans,” Russell Tracy said in the
Discover article. Tracy is a professor of pathology and biochemistry at the University of Vermont
College of Medicine. His pioneering research demonstrated the link between inflammation and heart
disease. He says inflammation “predicts having heart attacks, having heart failure, becoming diabetic;
predicts becoming fragile in old age; predicts cognitive function decline, even cancer to a certain
extent.”
Physicians are determining ways to decrease the ravages of silent inflammation—using different
markers for inflammation such as C-reactive protein (CPR)—to promote healthier aging and reverse
chronic disease. CPR is a plasma protein that helps regulate acellular activity and functioning in the
immune system. As an acute phase protein, CPR rises during systemic inflammation.
In the late 90s, Tracy and his colleagues showed that CPR is an “amazingly accurate predictor of a
future heart attack—as good or better than high blood pressure or high cholesterol.”
In 2003, after reviewing evidence linking inflammatory markers such as CRP with coronary heart
disease and stroke, the American Heart Association and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
published a joint scientific statement regarding the use of inflammatory markers in clinical and public
health practice.

According to the American Heart Association’s site . . .
• A growing number of studies have examined whether hs-CRP
(high sensitivity CRP) can predict recurrent cardiovascular
disease, stroke and death in different settings.
• High levels of hs-CRP consistently predict recurrent coronary events in
patients with unstable angina and acute myocardial infarction
(heart attack).
• Higher hs-CRP levels also are associated with lower survival rates in
these patients.
• Many studies have suggested that after adjusting for other prognostic
factors, hs-CRP is useful as a risk predictor.
• Studies also suggest that higher levels of hs-CRP may increase the risk
that an artery will reclose after it’s been opened by balloon angioplasty.
• High levels of hs-CRP in the blood also seem to predict prognosis and
recurrent events in patients with stroke or peripheral arterial disease.
It’s no secret: Inflammation increases with age. While many relentlessly pursue the secret to living
longer, the real secret is learning how to age well.
McGowan’s article looked at what the word “aging” translates to most us. “If you talk to many old
people, what they are really desperate about is not that fact that they’re going to die, but that they are
going to be sick, dependent and have to rely on others,” said Luigi Ferrucci, chief of the Longitudinal
Study of Aging.
As the Discover article points out, many prominent gerontologists now see aging as a “consequence of
inflammation.” Clearly, silent inflammation accelerates the clock. It’s similar to “little waves lapping
on the shore. It’s a relatively low level of activity, one that sustained over time wears away at the beach
and stimulates other bad events,” Harvey Jay Cohen said. Cohen is chairman of the department of
medicine and director of the Center for the Study of Aging at Duke University Medical Center.
Ferrucci’s research revealed “inflammatory activity breaks down skeletal muscle, which leads to the
loss of lean muscle mass.”
Per the article, people who suffer from Alzheimer’s “bristle with inflammatory cells and cytokines”
where the brain is clogged with senility-associated plaques. Research has shown that cytokines block
memory formation.
But now we’re seeing silent inflammation as treatable. And that may mean the chronic diseases linked
to inflammation may be treatable as well, from diabetes, dementia and heart disease to even cancer. As
McGowan writes, “It would almost surely allow us to live better, increasing the odds that we could all
spend our old age feeling . . . healthy, vibrant and vital.”

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How can you reduce inflammation? The inflammatory response can be “sharply inhibited” through
dietary restriction and lifestyle changes—which subsequently promote better health.
• Stay clear of polyunsaturated oils and trans fats.
• Increase vegetable intake, which gives you more antioxidants.
• Opt for low-gylcemic nutrition. Raw foods have lower gylcemic index than cooked vegetables or very ripe fruit.
• Exercise regularly and maintain a healthy weight—fat cells generate more inflammation.
• Augment your diet with omega-3 fatty acids that help the immune system modulate response, curcumin, garlic, ginger, pomegranate, luteolin, lipoic
acid, 5-Loxin, vitamin K and vitamin E.