More and more, it is looking like the kind of inflammation that occurs on a daily basis, the kind you never really notice, can have serious health consequences. And there is good reason to believe that daily anti-inflammatories can be a powerful preventive.
What got me started was a conversation with a neuroscience researcher. His research looks at why neural stem cells proliferate or not–why and when the human brain makes new brain cells. It turns out that the old dogma–that we only have the brain cells we were born with–is wrong. The brain does make new brain cells throughout life, but mostly when we are young. As we get older, the number of new cells created by neural stem cells decreases to insignificance. The researcher found that the main inhibitors of neural stem cell proliferation are inflammatory molecules.
So I asked him if simply taking an anti-inflammatory like ibuprofen (Advil, etc) would let our brains produce new cells like they did when young. The neuroscientists (who I won’t name because he hasn’t published this yet) said he hasn’t done the research to show that yet, but he has created a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease and showed that the mice taking Advil daily did not get Alzheimer’s and the control mice (which did not get Advil) did get the disease. In addition, once Alzheimer’s set in, Advil did not help. It only prevented dementia, but did not cure it.
That got me looking into more recent research about inflammation processes generally. More and more, it is looking like small, unnoticed inflammation raises the risk of all sorts of disease. Researchers have long know that chronic stress is not good and can cause disease. Now it looks like at least one mechanisms of this is that chronic stress downregulates the glucocorticoid receptor, which then cannot modulate the inflammatory response as well.
It has long been known that a daily aspirin can lead to much lower heart disease risk. The thinking was that aspirin’s ability to stop platelets from sticking together was able to keep clots from forming. Now it is looking like aspirin may in large part be reducing cardiovascular risk by inhibiting the inflammation that helps produce atherosclerosis in the first place.
How many diseases are made worse by inflammation? The very small risks of taking a daily anti-inflammatory seem very small compared to the potential benefits.
Chronic stress, glucocorticoid receptor resistance, inflammation, and disease risk.