TPOVs @F-L-O-W

Most of my TPOVs center around particularly useful models about how the world works.  I would be remiss if I didn't show TPOVs that are essential to learn about improving our well-being from all positions.  And while I will admit, there are a lot of dubious TPOV out there, so just because something is a TPOV, doesn't mean that it is good, right, and true, so to speak.

Yet over time, we must look more wholistically at our lives, and the way we live them and begin to understand what FLOW is really about, how the FLAWLESS LIVING OPERATING WORLDVIEW reaches out to not only become self-referring, but also self-organizing among you.  With that said, I think you'll like Inflammaging... I know I have been studying it for almost a decade and am always on the lookout for how it manifests.

Disclaimer and copyright notice: I lifted excerpts from the pdf referenced at the end of this paragraph, as I didn't want to rewrite it because it contains high quality information in my opinion about inflammation which I have written about before in our discussion list.  It's clear to me that inflammaging is perhaps one of the vital leverage points in our entire neurophysiological system.  The article that I copied this material from is freely available in the public domain here: http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/14511094/1089346374/name/%5E2011-03-18+Anatabine+Issue_noPortfolio.pdf

The Inflammaging Story

The name of the neural circuit that regulates the immune response to injury and invasion is the "inflammatory reflex.”  Inflammation is an extremely complex mechanism that involves the destruction through apoptosis of damaged cells, the healing of salvageable cells and the growth of entirely new cells.

In the last decade or so, it has become increasingly clear that inflammation plays a major complicating role in almost all diseases.  When we are young, the primary role of this important biological response is to heal injury or infection.  In the last century or so, the inflammatory reflex has begun to play a role that it almost never did in the past.

For the vast majority of human history, life was hard and life spans were short.  For Greeks during the Classical period of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., the average person lived only about 28 years.  It was nearly the same for ancient Romans.  Life spans rose to about 30 years in medieval Britain and reached, in the developed world, about 45 in the early 20th century. 

I think people tend to underestimate just how rough life was until very recently.  Before it was possible to mass-produce penicillin, during the Second World War, a broken bone that protruded through the skin resulted in death at least 50% of the time.  Being thrown from a horse, kicked by a cow or bitten by any kind of animal was a serious, potentially life-ending matter.  Early automobile accidents were far more dangerous because of the risk of secondary infection.  Lacking safer modern technologies, industrial and household accidents were more common and far more lethal. 

In the olden days, the only way to survive a nearly inevitable sequence of injuries was a strong inflammatory immune response.  If individuals didn't have the ability to mount a powerful inflammatory response, they were unlikely to live long enough to pass on their DNA. 

Today, however, life expectancies are pushing 80 years in North America.  Despite the inane delusions of green fantasists, modern life is altogether safer and better.  Medical technologies allow us to survive injuries and infections that would have quickly killed our grandparents. 

Herein lays the rub, however.  We still have an inflammatory reflex that was tuned in ancient Greece and medieval Europe. 

It is now understood that inflammation plays a role in virtually all diseases.  In fact, inflammation increases the rate of aging itself and leads to various pathologies.  This is why your dentist lectures you about flossing.  Inflammation from unhealthy gums increases the odds of getting heart disease and even Alzheimer's. 

Even with perfect gums, however, chronic inflammation increases as you age.  Eventually, it creates a problem serious enough to trigger a cascade effect.  Uncontrolled inflammation causes the simultaneous healing and destruction of cells.  This can lead to cancers, heart attacks, lupus, IBS, macular degeneration, stroke, obesity, ED, allergies, psoriasis, Crohn's disease, endometriosis, rheumatoid arthritis, hair loss, diseases of the organs such as the thyroid and liver as well as... well, you name it.

The general public learned about this for the first time in a 2004 Time magazine cover story titled "The Fire Within”. 

Today, scientists have advanced the science much further.  Many are now using the term "inflammaging”, coined by Claudio Franceschi, professor of immunology at the University of Bologna. 

It appears, in fact, that our immune systems react to the normal effects of aging as if they were injuries.  This initiates inflammation, an immune response.  This inflammation causes cellular stress, which increases the degree of chronic inflammation - which causes even more damage.  It is, by definition, an autoimmune disorder.  Some scientists call it auto[innate]immunity subclinical syndrome. 

It is a vicious circle, a chronic cycle that spins faster and faster until the organism itself eventually fails.  Aging, we now know, is not linear.  Like so many other things, it is an exponential process that accelerates over time. 

If there were a way to stop chronic low-level inflammation, however, we could put the brakes on the autoimmune inflammation cycle.  If we could stop chronic low-level inflammation, our bodies could heal naturally, just as they did before inflammaging kicked in.  We would even see cells damaged by past inflammation-related diseases heal normally. 

We're not talking about regenerative medicine, of course.  Our cells eventually reach their Hayflick limit even if we halt the inflammaging cycle.  We will eventually run out of the telomeres used every time a cell replaces itself through chromosome replication. 

Cells that are running out of telomeres stop functioning properly and eventually fail.  Regenerative medicine promises to replace aged cells and tissue with young telomere-restored cells and tissue.  An alternative route is the activation of the telomerase gene, which we know can restore telomeres to youthful lengths. 

In the meantime, however, we need to slow the process of telomere loss.  For some time, scientists have known that inflammation is the primary accelerator of telomere loss.  This is why so few of us reach our theoretical maximum life spans, which could be 120 years or more. 

We would be much, much more likely to reach that theoretical upper limit if we aged as we did when we were young.  It's often said that time speeds up as get older.  Now we know there is a great deal of truth to that adage, though not in the sense it is usually intended.  A drug that actually controlled inflammaging would restore the aging process to a more linear progression, as it was when we were young. 

For this reason, many scientists are looking for the means to reduce or stop inflammaging.  Not infrequently, this hypothetical drug has been referred to as the "holy grail" of drug discovery.  It's now clear that inflammaging is an autoimmune disorder caused when the immune regulatory system interprets the effects of aging as injury.  Therefore, the very condition of being "old" provokes NF-KB activation, initiating an immune response to injury.

Injuries and disease require immediate response, and that's what NF-KB facilitate.
If you don't have an actual injury or disease, however, the NF-KB creates all manner of havoc on the cellular level.  For more on this, you might read the Finnish study titled "Activation of Innate Immunity System During Aging: NF-KB Signaling Is the Molecular Culprit of Inflamm-Aging."

So when inflammaging occurs due to wrongly deployed NFKB, we see important indicators of inflammation.  These includes CRPs, tumor necrosis factors, and Interleukin-1 betas (IL-1β).