Is “chronic, smoldering low-grade inflammation” associated with many health issues?

Excerpts from a news item in the Washington Post,” Is ‘inflammaging’ part of getting older? Here’s what experts say,” written by Richard Sima and published 12 October 2025.

As we age, we tend to have more aches, pains, and diseases. Researchers believe that some of these may be related to persistent inflammation.  They call it “inflammaging” — age-related inflammation, which is present even in the absence of injury or illness.

It is considered a hallmark of aging and is characterized by a “chronic, smoldering low-grade inflammation,” said Vishwa Deep Dixit, a professor of pathology and immunobiology and the director of the Yale Center for Research on Aging.

This chronic smoldering is unfortunately associated with a host of health issues, but new research suggests that not everyone may experience inflammaging. Some Indigenous people don’t seem to get inflammaging at all compared with people in industrialized countries.

Either way, researchers are studying how to curb this type of inflammation to stave off its health effects.  Understanding inflammaging is crucial for understanding the biology of aging and what we “can do to stall the degenerative diseases that emerge from inflammaging,” Dixit said.

What causes inflammaging

Normally, inflammation is important to our bodies mounting an immune defense when we get an infection or injury and shutting off when the threat passes.

With inflammaging, however, inflammation persists even when there is no infection to fight. (“The purpose of this inflammation is actually still unclear,” Dixit said.)

A major source of the smoldering, inflammatory signals seems to be stressed out, damaged cells that release proteins indicating “something is not going well,” said Alan Cohen, an associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

“As we age, our internal stressors increase. This is more or less inevitable. Something is not going well. In any species that ages, something is not functioning as well with age,” he said.

Inflammaging and health

Inflammaging has been strongly associated with several age-related health conditions, including atherosclerosis, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, frailty, dementia and death.  Inflammaging (as we know it) is not universal.

In a recent study, Cohen and his colleagues found that inflammaging — at least as commonly measured with cytokines — is not universal and appears to be associated with an industrialized lifestyle.

How to manage inflammaging

A healthier lifestyle in your younger years will benefit you in your older years.

“Life is interesting in that sometimes it starts sending you a bill for the things you did 20 years earlier,” Vaccari said. Older people who already have high inflammation could adopt more targeted approaches to address the root causes of inflammation, Cohen said.

Here’s the link to the article: Is ‘inflammaging’ part of getting older? Here’s what experts say.

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