We now know, that for example, if you have high cholesterol and no inflammation there is very little risk for heart disease but if you have high cholesterol and high inflammation those are the people who are at high risk for heart disease. So, when you start to look at inflammation in the body it’s not what we can feel but there are ways of measuring through laboratory testing the amount of inflammation in our body and we are going to become more and more sophisticated about this.

And David Furman at Stanford who’s a scientist and doctor developed, through technologies only recently available, big data analytics, giant throughput analyses where you can look at thousands and thousands of blood markers. I mean, we go to the doctor, we get 10, 20 lab tests, right, 30, 40 maybe 50. There’s thousands of molecules floating around your blood and most of them we completely ignore. So, he was like, I don’t care what we are actually measuring. Let’s look what actually matters and so he put thousands of these chemicals through analytic machines correlated with people’s clinical history and was able to find four biomarker of inflammation and immune dysregulation that are highly predictive of aging, highly predictive of heart diseases, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, all those diseases. And we are becoming more and more sophisticated at our ability to look at inflammation. If you want to know more about this, you can go to Edifice, I think it’s Edifice Health is the company which is actually commercializing this test.

Questions: If people don’t have access to a functional medicine doctor are there tests that you recommend, they ask their doctor for to help them understand how inflamed they are?

Answer: Yeah, I mean there’s two aspects to this, one is checking for inflammation to see if you’re inflamed and then checking for why you have inflammation. It’s two different things. So, while inflammation may be imbalances in your gut flora, it may be toxins, maybe allergens, maybe your diet, maybe stress, right. So, we have to go down those rabbit holes. In terms of the actual measure of inflammation, we’re getting much more sophisticated about it. So, there’s a common test that your doctor can do called c-reactive protein and that’s really important. It has to be a high sensitivity c-reactive protein that can help you determine if there is a generalized level of inflammation. It’s good but not perfect.
Then there is a sedimentation rate which is an age-old test it looks at how long it takes your blood to settle. If it got a lot inflammatory proteins that doesn’t settle in the test tube very fast, that can be a sign. So, there’s common things we use. We can also look at cytocines, you can look at interleukins and we can look at two necrosis factor alpha and other biomarkers of inflammation. But that’s just scratching the surface.
There’s a whole, as I mentioned earlier, there is a scientist at Stanford who’s measured these unique analytes in your blood that doctors normally don’t test, that are the most predictive of aging and chronic diseases. So, we should probably be testing things like that. So those are the ways we kind of measure inflammation.