Imagine you’re playing soccer, and suddenly, you fall and scrape your knee. Ouch!
But don’t worry, your body starts to work right away to heal your wound. How? With inflammation.
Inflammation is your body’s superhero that fights the bad guys – like germs from a scraped knee.
It causes your knee to swell, turn red, feel warm, and maybe hurt a little. This is your body’s way of protecting you.
Usually, your body stops being inflamed once it has beaten the bad guys. But in some people, the inflammation doesn’t stop.
This can cause serious problems, like heart disease, diabetes, and even depression. This is known as chronic inflammation.
How Do Our Bodies Become Inflamed?
Scientists at a place called Cedars-Sinai have been trying to understand how inflammation works. They want to find a way to control it, especially when it causes problems.
Our bodies have a built-in defense system that helps us fight off harmful germs. This system uses white blood cells to attack any foreign invaders. That’s when inflammation happens.
Inflammation uses a special signal protein, IL-1 beta, which helps kick-start our body’s defense. Think of IL-1 beta as the referee who starts a soccer game.
Without the referee, the game can’t start. Without IL-1 beta, the inflammation process can’t start.
Discovering the Inflammation Pathway
The scientists found something interesting in their studies. There’s a special enzyme in our bodies called hexokinase. This enzyme usually helps turn sugar into energy for our cells, like turning water into power for a watermill.
But hexokinase does another important job too. When bad germs attack, hexokinase helps start the inflammation process.
It’s like a guard who spots the enemy and sounds the alarm. Hexokinase does this by sticking to a sugar that’s found on the outer wall of the bad bacteria.
Hexokinase’s alarm sets off other things inside the cell. It leaves a part of the cell called the mitochondria, which is like the cell’s power plant.
This sets off more alarms, making a kind of protein channel, called VDAC, cluster together. VDAC works with another protein called NLRP3 to start creating inflammasomes, the cells’ warriors.
These inflammasomes then produce the referee, IL-1 beta, which starts the inflammation game.
Understanding the Inflammation Pathway
The Cedars-Sinai team did various experiments to understand this process better.
They used special tools to block some cell functions and even turn off some genes. This helped them understand how important each step is in starting inflammation.
Dr. Sung Hoon Baik, a scientist on the team, used a powerful microscope to look at and measure these steps in individual cells. This was like watching a slow-motion replay of a soccer game to understand how the game was won.
The Next Steps
Understanding this process is really important. Yes, inflammation helps protect us, but it’s also important to keep our cells’ energy up. The scientists are careful not to turn everything off, because that could be harmful.
The team at Cedars-Sinai is still studying this process. They hope their findings can help find ways to control inflammation in people who suffer from chronic inflammation.
This could help treat serious illnesses that are caused by too much inflammation.
So, the next time you get a scrape and see your knee turn red, remember – it’s your body’s superheroes at work!
If you care about inflammation, please read studies about the cause of inflammation and clotting in severe COVID-19, and how avocados can help reduce inflammation.
For more information about inflammation, please see recent studies about hormone that could help reduce irregular heartbeat, inflammation, and results showing this drug for inflammation could help stop cancer metastasis.
The study was published in Immunology.
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