Heart Attacker #4: Chronic Inflammation

Chronic inflammation can increase your chance of heart disease -- and it's more common than you may think.

Inflammation That Can't Turn Itself Off

Slice your thumb while cutting a bagel. Slam the car door on your hand. Scald the roof of your mouth with the first bite of hot pizza. Your body’s response? Warmth, redness, and tenderness -- in other words, inflammation. It’s not a sign of weakness. Inflammation is a smart, take-no-prisoners defense mounted by your immune system to fix bodily damage fast and toss out intruders -- germs, dirt, or toxins -- before they can threaten life or limb. Any “attack” on your body -- from cuts and bruises to bacterial or viral infections -- triggers this rescue team, assembled by nature millions of years before the advent of soap, hot water, antibiotics, sutures, or hospital emergency rooms.

Your body’s defense force is hard at work when you see or feel inflammation’s trademark: a hot, red, tender spot. What you can’t see: on the inside, an army of infection fighters called macrophages, T cells, and natural killer cells engulfing and destroying germs and materials that shouldn’t be there, while squadrons of molecular “traffic cops” direct the immune system’s well- choreographed work.

Inflammation has been a part of the human healing process since before the first people stood up on two feet, but this brilliant system may be doing its job too well for 21st-century humans. How? 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 inflammation that can’t turn itself off. This chronic inflammation -- a response to overweight, sitting disease, aging, less-than-meticulous hygiene, low-grade infection, and the stress of modern living -- attacks the very cells it intends to rescue.

The result is that your cells are under constant barrage by immune system chemicals. Recent research suggests that these chemicals help create plaque, the fatty gruel that grows inside artery walls. The chemicals also prompt plaque to rupture, spewing gunk into the bloodstream and causing the formation of blood clots that can stop a heart. At high levels, inflammation doubles or even quadruples heart risk.

Researchers have long known that inflammation plays a key role in conditions such as asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s disease. Recently, though, studies led by Harvard Medical School cardiologist Paul M. Ridker, M.D., Ph.D., and others have linked it to heart disease and stroke, as well as type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. Dr. Ridker and his colleagues have found that one marker of inflammation, an immune system traffic cop called C-reactive protein (CRP), is a better predictor of heart disease than cholesterol numbers. It may help identify the 10 to 20 percent of Americans who are at risk for heart attacks despite having healthy-looking cholesterol numbers.

• • Common Problems
• • Heart Disease
• • Stress

• Heart Attacker #1: Excess Body Fat
• How concerned should you be about your love handles?
• 
• Heart Attacker #2: Cholesterol
• Cholesterol wreaks havoc on your heart. Are you at risk?
• 
• Heart Attacker #3: High Blood Pressure
• See how high blood pressure affects your heart -- and what you can do about it.
• 
• Heart Attacker #5: Metabolic Syndrome
• You may not know it, but metabolic syndrome may be steering you toward heart disease.
• 
• Heart Attacker #6: Oxidative Stress
• Oxidative stress is a threat to your heart. Find out how to prevent it.
• 
• Beyond the Big 6 Heart Threats: Emerging Markers
• Researchers have uncovered four new major heart threats.
• 

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To help untangle my fishing gear, I asked my wife and her sister to walk the fishing line across our front yard and hold it taut while I reeled it back in. A man strolling by saw the two good-looking women and did a double take. "I don't know what you're using for bait," he said to me, "but I'll take a dozen."

-- Constantino Tata