Health Farm

-- Chronic, low-level inflammation plays a role in a host of diseases, including type-2 diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, cancer, and even depression.

The news gets worse. A new study has uncovered a link between inflammation in apparently healthy adolescents and premature death in adulthood.

Analysing blood samples from 106,000 healthy Swedish men aged 16 to 20 years old, researchers conducted a test known as a ‘sed’ rate (erythrocyte sedimentation rate) which is a general indicator of inflammation.

Thirty-five years after the young men were first tested, 4,835 of their members had died.

However, the men who recorded a sed rate of less than 10 millimetres per hour fared much better than those with a sed rate higher than 15, who were 36% more likely to die prematurely from any cause.

What’s more, the group with a higher sed rate were also 78% more likely to die from cancer, 54% more likely to die from cardiovascular disease, and more than twice as likely to die from a heart attack.

Inflammation is a killer, but don’t take it lying down.

Try the Mediterranean diet, or Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH), which contain foods linked to lower levels of inflammation. Or the MIND diet, a combination of the two plans that specifically recommends berries and leafy greens.

All three eating patterns are associated with a lower incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. In the case of the MIND diet, the association held even with only moderate adherence.