Inflammation is a basic part of protecting us against infection and inducing repair after injury.  It literally is an important process to allow us to survive in our environment.  Unfortunately, the inflammatory process can be activated by the wrong circumstances and persisting long after it should have been quieted.  When this occurs, inflammation literally switches from being a protective process to one that drives chronic disease.

During infection, inflammation activates different parts of the immune system activating cells such as T cells to produce bacterial and viral killing granzymes.  It also helps activate B cells to produce antibodies which neutralize these infectious organisms.  It is actually the inflammation that makes us feel bad during infection with the end game of resolving the infection.

After injury, the damaged tissue clean up is driven by inflammation as it is preventing infection into the area.  Once that is done, inflammation ideally turns off and repair begins.  As with infection, a significant amount of the pain associated with injury is the inflammation needed to allow repair.

So if inflammation is essential, how can it be such a problem driving or contributing to many of the common diseases and health problems?  The difference between helpful and harmful inflammation relates to the circumstances it occurs in:

• What is triggering it?
• Is it self-limiting and resolving?

This question about inflammation is one of intense interest and discussion in research. Up until 1990, PubMed, the search engine for the biomedical literature of the National Library of Medicine contained only 4809 papers with both search terms “inflammation” and “chronic disease”.  Fast forward to January 2, 2025, those search terms now show 119,232 papers.

As I traveled extensively lecturing to doctors on health problems highly linked to inflammation, I would struggle to find new reading in airport gift shops.  Interestingly, lay publications such as Discovery Magazine, Time, and National Geographic have also focused on this topic.  Once I turned 50, I found that even the AARP Bulletin talked about the topic.

Given all of the hype about inflammation and disease, I thought it would be appropriate to do a deep dive into the difference between protective inflammation and disease causing inflammation.  It pretty much comes down to what is triggering it and is it self-limiting and resolving?  We hope you find this blog series helpful in pursuing a healthy 2025 and beyond.