Cause of Inflammation – Cause of Diverse Clinical Pictures
Identifying and treating the causes of inflammation plays a central role in immunological practice.
Inflammation is one of the natural defense reactions of the human organism and serves the immune system as an effective weapon in the defense against pathogens for a short time.
However, if inflammation transitions into a chronic phase, it no longer fulfills a useful function for the organism, but instead triggers various diseases and disorders or hinders a necessary immunological defense reaction. Thus, inflammations themselves are disease triggers.
Silent inflammations are often the cause of
cancer development
, the basis of
autoimmune diseases
, chronic infections and premature aging.
The determination of the inflammation parameters belongs to the classical laboratory parameters. Surely these have been determined a few times during your visit to your family doctor or specialist.
These include:
- Erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR)
- C-reactive protein (CRP)
- Leukocytes
You can often recognize acute inflammations yourself by the classic signs of inflammation. These are:
- Pain
- Redness
- Swelling
- Heat
- Function or mobility are restricted (e.g. joint)
But these laboratory parameters usually only provide very general information about existing inflammations, say nothing about the cause and the specific location of the inflammation. For this reason, we need further investigations to find out exactly that.
Today, we are increasingly confronted with new challenges for the human organism: stress, environmental pollutants, poor diet, new allergens, etc.
Silent Inflammation
Since these new environmental conditions are partly unknown to our immune system, the interaction of our immune system with them leads to today’s civilization diseases, which are often associated with an unnoticed, but constant activation of the immune system and are therefore described as “Silent Inflammation”.
These silent inflammations, if the body cannot bring them under control, can become chronic and thus lead to serious diseases. They are also regarded in particular as a building block of cancer development.
In order to get to the bottom of the causes of inflammation, we need a more detailed diagnosis and laboratory values.
In our practice, these include in particular:
- TNF-alpha
- IFN-gamma
- IP-10
- Histamine
- Ferritin
- Pro-inflammatory cytokines
- Calprotectin
- Endotoxin
These laboratory values are not all determined, but are determined in a targeted manner, depending on the symptoms and already existing findings, in order to narrow down the cause of the disease and develop a targeted therapy.
Important and competent partners in laboratory medicine include the IMD Labor in Berlin and the laboratory lab4more in Munich.
