The Cyto-kinest Cut of All (or How to Cut Chronic Illness Costs to the Bone)

Dolors & Sense

by Sanford Rose

KISSIMMEE FL—(Weekly Hubris)—4/18/11—The graduate (Dustin Hoffman) “got” one word: plastics. It was the key word of its time.

Is there a key word for our time? Is there a single locution that represents a source of limitless prosperity, a catholicon for economic and social ills?

Of course there is. It is the word “cytokine.”

Let’s follow this chain:

Americans spend nearly 18 percent of their income on so-called health care. A high proportion of that outsize bill is for the treatment of chronic diseases.

Most chronic diseases are caused by persistent low levels of systemic inflammation. (That includes heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes mellitus and, yes, Alzheimer’s.)

That inflammation results very likely from the rupture of fat cells lodged in the gut.

When these break, proteins called cytokines that are manufactured throughout the body rush in to heal the injury. What we call inflammation is in fact the action of cytokines, from the Greek meaning “cells that move.”

An occasional rupture of adipocytes can be handled by these succoring messengers.

Continual fat-cell rupturing cannot be. Debris from these cytokines clogs the body.

Fat kills, working through cytokines.

Yet, paradoxically, that which kills can also save.

When muscle cells rupture, there is also a rush of cytokines.

But not all are inflammatory.

Traveling in the wake of the inflammatory cytokines—indeed, treading on their heels—are their anti-inflammatory cousins. These clean up the debris.

What’s more, they don’t confine their activity to the muscle that originally ruptured. They communicate their cleansing message to adjacent tissue.

They are all-body-friendly, miniature endocrine systems.

The message is perhaps prosaic, at least half of it: Eat too much and you’ll perish in a home-made fiery furnace.

But flex those muscles (the harder, the better), and you’ll mobilize those types of cytokine that, amazingly, cool the whole body.

In the process, you will cool the body politic by saving yourself and your fellow citizens hundreds of billions of dollars of dispensable health-care costs.