Immunity in Overdrive

How to manage your body’s defenses to stay healthy

By Melinda Wenner Moyer

Twenty-four-year-old Dana Wax has never had a cold. She’s also managed to skirt the flu her whole life, and she’s willing to bet she’ll never get strep throat. Her secret is not echinacea or vitamin C—it’s her immune system. “That’s what happens when your immune system is crazy,” she says.

Crazy? How about awesome? Don’t we all want immune systems strong enough to fight off every possible intruder?

Not Dana—she’d be happy to trade hers in for a lazier model. Dana may be flu free, but since her teens she’s suffered from chronic stomachaches, headaches, and severe joint pain; she describes it as the kind of excruciating pain you might feel if a refrigerator fell on top of each of your joints at the same time. For years, all her doctors knew was that her blood tests indicated that her immune system was working harder than normal. As a student at New York University, she relied on high-dose steroids and other powerful drugs—delivered via a permanent IV—to give her the strength to walk to class.

Dana’s luck turned last year when she visited a specialist who finally diagnosed her: She had an extremely rare autoinflammatory disease known as a cryopyrin-associated periodic syndrome. On her new drugs, she has been able to ease off steroids, no longer needs a permanent catheter, and reports that the bone-crushing pain is nearly gone. “So this is what it’s supposed to feel like to be a young woman,” she says.

Dana is living, walking proof that an overactive immune system hurts you far more than it helps you. In eons past—before vaccines and antibiotics were available—immune diligence helped us survive deadly epidemics. But today, superimmunity is more foe than friend. The chemicals that our bodies produce to kill intruders like bacteria and viruses also tear up our own tissues over time, and they can increase our risk for a number of diverse diseases.

“Inappropriate inflammation is the root cause of a host of chronic illnesses, including cardiovascular disease, allergies, type 1 diabetes, asthma, and even some forms of cancer,” says Andrew Weil, MD, director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.

You may think your immune system is nothing like Dana’s, but “there is no question that chronic inflammatory conditions are more prevalent today than in years past,” Weil says. “The explosive increase in the incidence of these chronic ailments, not only in women but in men and children, as well, strongly suggests more people are experiencing chronic inflammation than ever before.”

Many of the things we’re exposed to on a daily basis trigger inflammation, including the processed foods we eat and the industrial chemicals we breathe, notes DeLisa Fairweather, PhD, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Heck, even stress ramps up immune activity, and some studies show that “stressed-out” mice even had stronger immune responses than their stress-free friends.

So why does the immune system—which exists solely to keep us healthy—also have the capacity to hurt us? Because it is “an itchy finger with a shotgun,” says Charles Raison, MD, director of the Behavioral Immunology Clinic at Emory University. If your immune system senses something abnormal in the body—a chemical, a microbe, or even a breath of polluted air—it immediately goes into attack mode and releases powerful immune mediators called cytokines that damage the intruder, dialing back infection.

All is well and good if the immune attack is short lived. But if the immune system stays turned on—which can happen if the body is constantly bombarded by damage, industrial chemicals, or processed foods—then the inflammation “spreads to areas of the body not affected by direct injury or attack, persists unchecked beyond resolution of the initial insult, and actually injures healthy tissues,” Weil says. That’s when inflammation turns on us: Instead of helping us, it starts to kill us.

Chronic inflammation increases risk of heart disease and stroke, and cytokines release damaging free radicals and stimulate cell growth, which increases cancer risk. According to a recent study at the National Institutes of Health, cytokines also increase overall wear and tear on brain cells, which can increase the risk of depression, dementia, and neurodegenerative diseases. Even the aging process itself seems to be inextricably linked to inflammation: The elderly have two to four times as many cytokines in their blood as young people do.

The good news is that it’s possible to quiet our overly excitable immune systems. Weil recommends avoiding processed foods and hydrogenated fats and instead filling your grocery cart with cold-water fish, whole grains, walnuts, freshly ground flaxseeds, and brightly colored fresh vegetables and fruit. He also says it’s better to get your protein from vegetables and beans than from animal products. Fairweather notes that women should avoid breathing secondary smoke and eat organic food whenever possible, because the chemicals you breathe or ingest can aggravate sensitive immune cells in your throat.

Exercise is another important way to manage inflammation. Adults who exercise have lower levels of C-reactive protein, a marker for inflammation, in their blood. But it’s important to let your body rest, too. “We’re well equipped for up to an hour and a half of high-intensity effort, but then the body doesn’t like it,” says David Nieman, director of the Human Performance Labs at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. Nieman’s studies on ultramarathon runners have found that inflammatory markers spike after races but typically drop back to normal within a couple of days. He recommends that intense exercisers rest between workouts and take supplements containing quercetin, a compound found in apple peels, as well as fish oil and green tea extract. Together these compounds seem to reduce exercise-induced inflammation drastically; a combination supplement containing all three should be available later this year.

Ultimately, women who are concerned about inflammation—or notice that their immune systems are a little too diligent—should talk to their doctors. It may be possible, for instance, to request a blood test that analyzes inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein. Dana, for one, wishes she’d been more on top of her immune problems from the get-go and that she hadn’t been so discouraged by the dozens of doctors who were skeptical there was anything actually wrong with her.

“You know your body,” she says. “If you really feel that there’s something wrong with you, don’t let somebody tell you otherwise.”

Are You Inflamm-aging?

Chronic inflammation is at the root of many devastating diseases, but it does its dirty work in very different ways. Here’s a rundown of how an overzealous immune system can do damage.

Aging:

Some researchers refer to the aging process as “inflamm-aging” because of how closely it’s linked to inflammation. As you age, it becomes more difficult for your body to repair damage from everyday wear and tear (think sore muscles and the occasional bump or bruise). Although minor, this damage still activates an immune response, which compounds acute inflammation resulting from infections or illnesses. According to a study published in 2006 in the journal Mechanisms of Aging and Development, elderly people have two to four times as many cytokines, powerful immune chemicals, in their blood as young people do.

Depression and dementia:

Cytokines release free radicals, which damage cell tissue and DNA while also inhibiting the production of enzymes that the body uses to repair neuron damage. The result? Chronic inflammation may prevent brain cells from regenerating and contribute to an increased risk of developing depression and dementia.

Heart disease:

An abundance of “bad” LDL cholesterol in your blood incites an immune response from your body. The reacting immune cells—macrophages—can bind together and actually develop into stroke-causing plaques. A 2005 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that inflammation was one of the most significant root causes of heart disease.

Cancer:

Any chemical that sparks cell growth has the potential to increase cancer risk, and cytokines—which boost the production of new immune cells and stem cells—are no exception. Cytokines also release free radicals that can provoke cancer-causing mutations in the DNA of otherwise healthy cells. A study published last year in the Journal of Clinical Oncology suggests that high levels of C-reactive protein, a protein and inflammatory marker that binds to damaged cells, correspond to a reduced survival rate among women with breast cancer.