Posted by Mike on March 14th, 2008 in Uncategorized

Last time in this forum I was wondering about the relationship between inflammation, O (singlet oxygen), aging and death and promised to “’splain it to you” as best I can. Here goes.

Singlet oxygen has an unpaired electron. It’s like N instead of N2. O instead of O2. These atoms don’t like living alone. The want to hook that unpaired electron up with something, and almost anything will do.

As you might guess, singlet oxygen is produced in huge quantities in lots of biological processes. Our body uses radicals in many way, including killing bugs. Macrophages, for instance attack bugs by injecting them with radicals. This has a tendency to ruin their day by blowing them up. The problem is that they, the radicals, attach to our cellular membranes, including plasma and mitochondrial membrane through a process called lipid peroxydation which attacks unsaturated fatty acids present in membrane phospholipids as well as other membrane proteins. In other words, it wrecks our cellular membranes, makes them rigid, weak and ready for the trash heap.

I guess you are, being quick witted folks, getting where I am going now: The health of the membranes, the packages that all living cells must maintain, is directly related to the process of aging. When your skin gets saggy, loses its elasticity, when the muscles don’t work as well, to what do owe this to? Cellular aging. I suggest that Imre Zs.-Nagy in his (her?) book the “Membrane Hypothesis of Aging” may be on to something. Human death and aging is cellular death, cellular death is caused by membrane death.

Where does inflammation lie in all of this. Inflammation is the result of a huge biochemical cascade response which gets rid of pathogens and “other bad actor” in the body, real or imagined. The biochemical agents are designed among other things to produce a huge multiplication of the cascade of the “compliment system” of the immune response, which includes a complex of chemicals called, interestingly, the Membrane Attack System. The MAS’s job it is to, well, attack membranes, especially cell membranes. It would be nice if the membranes it attacked were bad guy membranes, but alas, it ain’t always the case.

When I said that the bad actors could be real or imagined, I was not being facetious. Auto immune disorders, which include 35 or so really nasty things from Type I diabetes to Myasthenia Gravis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), MS, Crohn’s disease, Lupus, Celiac disease and Rheumatoid arthritis just name a few, hurt and kill people because the immune system imagines a problem that is not real. The immune system kills cells by inflamming and attacking membranes membranes.

Why is it not possible that this is the very mechanism responsible for our aging? Just in the act of protecting ourselves from the bad actors that try to kill us, we kill ourselves. Slowly but surely, day by day we kill ourselves.

Maybe in the act of eating Kermit we save ourselves. I have a whole pond full of the critters. Or are they toads? In any case, take your Ibuprofen and maybe save yourself, inflammation free.