What you need to know about inflammation

If you cut your thumb while slicing bread, slam the car door on your finger or scald the roof of your mouth on hot coffee, your body will respond. This response to injury is warmth, redness, and tenderness — in other words, inflammation. Here's what you need to know about inflammation.

This is not a sign of weakness: inflammation is a clever defense that your immune system mounts to repair body damage fast and repel intruders like germs, dirt or toxins before they pose a threat.

Any "attack" on your body — from cuts and bruises to bacterial or viral infections — triggers this response, which has evolved over millions of years.

Your body's defenses are already at work when you become aware of any hot, red, tender area.

What you can't see is what's going on under your skin: an army of infection fighters called macrophages, T-cells, and natural killer cells are engulfing and destroying germs and matter that shouldn't be there, while squadrons of molecular "traffic police" direct the immune system's work.

Inflammation has always been a part of the human healing process, but this brilliant system may be doing its job too well for 21st century humans. The problem isn't the short bouts of inflammation that fight infection or heal a shaving nick in a day or two. The modern threat comes from the sort of inflammation that can't switch itself off.

Chronic inflammation is an immune response to being overweight, aging, physical inactivity, less-than-meticulous hygiene, low-grade infection and stress. In this situations this immune response attacks the very cells it intends to rescue. As a result, immune system chemicals constantly bombarded your cells.

Recent research suggests that those immune system chemicals help to create plaque, the fatty gruel that grows on artery walls. The chemicals also prompt plaque to rupture, spewing gunk into the bloodstream and causing the formation of blood clots that will block the heart's arteries, thus causing the death of that part of the heart's muscle.

Researchers have long known that inflammation plays a key role in a variety of conditions such as asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn's disease.

Studies are currently underway around the world to determine the precise process that triggers the body's inflammatory response, and how the body responds to the damage that follows. Recent Harvard Medical School studies found that one marker of inflammation, an immune system molecule known as C-reactive protein (CRP), is a strong predictor of heart disease. This discovery may help to identify those who are at risk of heart attack despite having apparently healthy cholesterol levels.

If you want to learn more about inflammation and how it affects your health, then use this article's information to help start a conversation with your doctor.