What Is Chronic Inflammation?
Inflammation in the body can be either acute or chronic. It’s a part of the body’s defense mechanism and healing process. However, chronic inflammation refers to a slow, long-term inflammation, which lasts for prolonged periods of several months to years.
What Causes Chronic Inflammation?
Chronic inflammation is central to many chronic conditions, especially those that develop with age. Identifying the precise causes that lead to inflammation — and why some people appear to be more sensitive to them than others — isn’t so simple. What is clear, however, is that diet appears to have the most significant impact.
In fact, the National Health Service has found a correlation between diets with a high content of processed foods, such as soft drinks, refined grains, and processed meats, and inflammatory biomarker levels. Why? This is mainly because processed foods are typically high in chemical additives.
Beyond a poor diet, there are other factors that can elicit an inflammatory response, including:
- Chronic stress
- Obesity
- Smoking and alcohol
- Injuries, infectious organisms, and diseases such as tuberculosis and rheumatoid arthritis
- Recurrent episodes of acute inflammation
- Long-term exposure to toxins, irritants, pollutants or other foreign materials
- Auto-inflammatory disorders (familial Mediterranean fever).
- Increased production of free radicals, uric acid (urate) crystals, oxidized lipoproteins, homocysteine, and others