Explainer | What is inflammation? Causes, types, symptoms, treatment for chronic cases, and its link to cancer and autoimmune diseases

Inflammation is a process that helps the body fight infection and injury, but unchecked, it may trigger autoimmune diseases and other serious illness

Experts’ advice on dialling it down includes replacing processed foods with immunity-strengthening whole foods, managing stress, and getting exercise and sleep

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Experts explain the different types of inflammation and the potential risks, and provide advice on how sleep, whole foods and exercise can make it go away. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 4:15am, 25 May 2022

Heart disease, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and cancer are all serious conditions that share a link with chronic inflammation.

Inflammation isn’t actually a bad thing – it’s when acute inflammation doesn’t resolve and becomes chronic that it starts to have a negative impact on our health.

“We need inflammation to fight infections and injuries,” says Maxi Schoenteich, an osteopath and functional medicine practitioner at Integrated Medicine Institute in Hong Kong. “However, when inflammation does not stop and persists beyond the initial infection or injury, we run into problems.”

When we catch a cold or flu, for example, our immune system is triggered and sends out white blood cells to the infection site where they secrete pro-inflammatory molecules called cytokines to fight the virus.

When acute inflammation becomes chronic it starts to have a negative impact on our health. Photo: Shutterstock

Some of these molecules travel through our body to our brain to trigger an increase in body temperature – this explains why we get a fever when we have a cold or flu.