Chronic diseases are the greatest threat to human health. This is the assessment of the World Health Organization, whichlinks this type of pathology to chronic inflammation and predicts that this association will affect millions of people over the next 30 years.
When we talk about chronic diseases, we are referring to conditions that last three months or longer, so it is a term that encompasses a large number of pathologies. In Spain, 45 percent of the population over the age of 15 is affected by a chronic condition. This figure increases as people get older; 70 percent of those over 65 may have four chronic conditions at the same time.
According to the 2017 National Health Survey, the most common chronic health problems are:
• High blood pressure
• Chronic lower back pain
• Cholesterol
• Osteoarthritis
• Chronic allergies
• Chronic back pain (cervical)
• Varicose veins in the legs
• Headaches or migraines
• Diabetes
• Chronic anxiety
• Depression
• Thyroid problems
• Cataracts
• Asthma
• Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
These types of diseases are very different from one another, but let's think about what it means to live with a disease for long periods of time: special care, medication, and constant monitoring. Is that all we can do to promote health?
It is a fact that healthy lifestyle habits help prevent disease; diet, physical exercise, stress, tobacco and alcohol consumption, and the environment in which we live are factors that we know can affect our health. We can take direct action on some of these factors: every day we choose what we eat, decide whether or not to smoke, and take steps to manage stress and get enough rest.
However, what are our lifestyle habits?Forty percent of women do not engage in any type of exercise. This sedentary lifestyle affects 34 percent of men. Although they engage in more physical activity, 50 percent of men drink alcohol regularly and 24 percent smoke daily. Twenty-four percent of women consume alcohol regularly and 19 percent smoke daily. In terms of diet, almost half of the population does not eat fruit or vegetables on a daily basis.
Can we link lifestyle habits to chronic diseases? Yes, they are related, but we cannot always establish a direct causal relationship. From the perspective of biological medicine, we understand that diseases have multiple causes and that lifestyle can be a trigger. It is true that our environment, pollution, toxins that act as endocrine disruptors, etc. , are changing the prevalence of diseases , and in our practice we are seeing more and more patients suffering from allergies and autoimmune diseases.
Inflammation is our immune system's response to slow down the progression of damage in our body. This process also allows tissue to be restored and damage to be repaired, and is localized in the part of our tissue that has been attacked by an external agent.
This should be the normal process, but sometimes there is no injury and yet there is inflammation, or the inflammation does not end when it should. This is chronic inflammation and is a risk factor for the development of chronic diseases such as cancer or autoimmune diseases. What is the cause of this persistent inflammation and how do we locate it?
Firstly, we can see that chronic inflammation is the response to infections that have not been cured, due to an abnormal immune response or even conditions such as obesity. On the other hand, there are chronic inflammations that do not present apparent symptoms and others, such as ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease, which are defined and can be diagnosed. This gives us an advantage in disease prevention.
Chronic inflammation is a dysfunction that paves the way for chronic diseases, and the challenge is to diagnose it. So far, only a few biomarkers that indicate inflammation are known, such as a protein found in blood plasma, but progress must be made in identifying substances in the immune system that may indicate chronic inflammation.
According to an article published in Nature Medicine by a group of experts including scientists from the US National Institutes of Health and universities such as Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, and London, inflammation-related diseases cause 50 percent of deaths worldwide.
This publication describes how persistent and severe inflammation plays a key role in heart disease, cancer, diabetes, kidney disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and autoimmune and neurodegenerative disorders. In addition to the importance of advancing the diagnosis of this inflammation, they add the importance of prevention, which can only be achieved if we are aware of the risk factors for inflammation:
Biological medicine provides a diagnostic approach that complements conventional medicine. Beyond the symptom-diagnosis-treatment relationship, we look for the causes of these symptoms and the interrelationship between them. What could have triggered a disease? Where does one symptom or another come from? These are questions we must ask ourselves in order to act effectively.
Dr. Mariano Bueno, medical director of Biosalud Day Hospital, has been treating chronic diseases for over 30 years and affirms that there are a number of factors common to these pathologies, such as oxidative stress, intestinal flora balance, and mitochondrial activity, among others.
