Chronic Inflammation: Understanding the “Cytokine Storm”

The leading causes of death among Americans are slow developing, lifestyle-related chronic diseases. This includes diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer, hypertension or high cholesterol levels. Diet can often be (but not always) the underlying condition reflected as obesity. Obesity is now considered to be a major risk factor for complications of COVID-19 infections.

A previous post explains the role of diet in this occurrence. The post was written before the co-morbidities (underlying conditions) were associated with inflammation and severe COVID infections. The following well written article was initially published in The Conversation and succinctly explains how the role of inflammation can contribute to severe COVID and death often described as the “cytokine storm”.

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Some Good News for a Vaccine?

In case you wonder why a food blogger like me is posting this article, I taught an infectious disease course for a number of years, worked in academia in Microbiology and Immunology, and antibody production in the body was part of my doctoral dissertation.

I love this article for the fact that it is often hard to find facts that you can trust – so I hope that this brings us some hope for a successful vaccine ASAP against Covid-19.

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How to Boost Your Immune System

In our current environment of the coronavirus, we are told to stay healthy and take precautions such as hand washing, avoiding large crowds, cleaning surfaces, eating a healthy diet, getting enough sleep, etc. No one seems to mention that every second of every day the body is working to protect us from armies of hostile bacteria, fungi and viruses that swarm on our skin; yet we usually remain amazingly healthy most of the time.

The body has evolved to approach these foes – if you’re not with us – you’re against us! So the components of the immune system work together to destroy any foreign invader. To implement that stance, it relies on two built-in defense systems, the innate defense system and the adaptive defense system that act both independently and cooperatively. However, it is extremely important to support this system with a healthy lifestyle for optimum functioning and its ability to keep us well.

Innate defenses include:

Surface barriers (skin, mucous membranes)

Internal defenses (phagocytes, natural killer cells, inflammation, antimicrobial proteins, fever

Adaptive defenses include:

Humoral immunity (B cells, plasma cells, antibodies, memory cells)

Cellular immunity (Helper T cells, cytotoxic T-cells, memory cells)

These two systems are deeply intertwined and when operating effectively, they protect us from most infectious microorganisms, cancer cells, and (unfortunately) organ transplants and grafts.

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