I always wonder if this is a design flaw, or if there is another completely worse state that the body is trying to prevent happening, a state we don't even know about until we have "cured" inflammation and all these other diseases
sort of like how we wouldn't be studying a lot of this stuff right now if such a large portion of the population hadn't gotten so old
Having talked to a doc, I learned this for myself: inflammation is simply an immune reaction where body believes that there is something to be fought, either rightly (infection) or wrongly (allergy).
You can have low inflammation if you're healthy. But also if you're sick, but your immune system is not putting up a fight.
You can have high inflammation if the immune system is fighting a good fight, fending off intruders. But also maybe it's fighting its own host body, or a stray speckle of dust.
Can't tell much just from the metric alone. If inflammation is high then something is up for sure, but then... it may or may not need intervention. So not helpful, really. Chronic inflammation is probably a good indicator that the immune system is not winning.
> If inflammation is high then something is up for sure
Is that really the case? I have psoriasis on my elbows and knees which is caused by an overzealous immune system attacking the skin and causing excessive new skin cell growth (which causes the dry plaques). I guess there is an underlying systemic cause, but most of the (extreme) treatments are about blocking the immune system response.
I think GP meant that if inflammation is high, something is wrong - either with the body, or immune system itself. In your case, it would be the latter.
There's a lot of evidence suggesting that it's a feature rather than a bug.
There's lots of bad things that happens as you get older and upregulation of inflammation plays an important part in that.
The thing is it's not random though. It happens in a synchronized fashion.
It does seem increasingly likely that our genetic code contains instructions to make us increasingly frail and sick as we get older,to slowly increase the probability of death.
We see this more clearly other places in nature. Closely related species that have ended up in different environments over time can have dramatically lifespans.
I have seen various hypotheses for this, including models that suggest that there's a tendency for older individuals to keep too much of the resources so that the younger generations won't have enough resources to grow and flourish.
Or it could just be that there was never a lot of evolutionary pressure for the "stay fit while old" traits. Being healthy for long enough to reproduce and provide some care for your progeny was usually good enough from the evolutionary standpoint, so the frailty-at-old-age genes weren't actively selected against.
It could be something similar to the Hygiene Hypothesis [1].
Basically the body and immune system co-evolved in an environment with a higher level of dirt, germs, and injury. Our immune system is designed for that more hostile world but now we live cushy sterile lives free from injury most days.
In summary, there is a mismatch between the environment the immune system is designed for and the one it currently finds itself in.
