The National Institutes of Health recently designated inflammation a priority. Illustration by Chad Hagen

Several years ago, I fell at the gym and ripped two tendons in my wrist. The pain was excruciating, and within minutes my hand had swollen grotesquely and become hot to the touch. I was reminded of a patient I’d seen early in medical school, whose bacterial infection extended from his knee to his toes. Latin was long absent from the teaching curriculum, but, as my instructor examined the leg, he cited the four classic symptoms of inflammation articulated by the Roman medical writer Celsus in the first century: rubor, redness; tumor, swelling; calor, heat; and dolor, pain. In Latin, inflammatio means “setting on fire,” and as I considered the searing pain in my injured hand I understood how the condition earned its name.

Inflammation occurs when the body rallies to defend itself against invading microbes or to heal damaged tissue. The walls of the capillaries dilate and grow more porous, enabling white blood cells to flood the damaged site. As blood flows in and fluid leaks out, the region swells, which can put pressure on surrounding nerves, causing pain; inflammatory molecules may also activate pain fibres. The heat most likely results from the increase in blood flow.

The key white blood cell in inflammation is called a macrophage, and for decades it has been a subject of study in my hematology laboratory and in many others. Macrophages were once cast as humble handmaidens of the immune system, responsible for recognizing microbes or debris and gobbling them up. But in recent years researchers have come to understand that macrophages are able to assemble, within themselves, specialized platforms that pump out the dozens of molecules that promote inflammation. These platforms, called inflammasomes, are like pop-up factories—quickly assembled when needed and quickly dismantled when the crisis has passed.

For centuries, scientists have debated whether inflammation is good or bad for us. Now we believe that it’s both: too little, and microbes fester and spread in the body, or wounds fail to heal; too much, and nearby healthy tissue can be degraded or destroyed. The fire of inflammation must be tightly controlled—turned on at the right moment and, just as critically, turned off. Lately, however, several lines of research have revealed that low-level inflammation can simmer quietly in the body, in the absence of overt trauma or infection, with profound implications for our health. Using advanced technologies, scientists have discovered that heart attacks, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease may be linked to smoldering inflammation, and some researchers have even speculated about its role in psychiatric conditions.

As a result, understanding and controlling inflammation has become a central goal of modern medical investigation. The internal research arm of the National Institutes of Health recently designated inflammation a priority, mobilizing several hundred scientists and hundreds of millions of dollars to better define its role in health and disease; in 2013, the journal Science devoted an entire issue to the subject. This explosion in activity has captured the public imagination. In best-selling books and on television and radio talk shows, threads of research are woven into cure-all tales in which inflammation is responsible for nearly every malady, and its defeat is the secret to health and longevity. New diets will counter the inflammation simmering in your gut and restore your mental equilibrium. Anti-inflammatory supplements will lift your depression and ameliorate autism. Certain drugs will tamp down the silent inflammation that degrades your tissues, improving your health and extending your life. Everything, and everyone, is inflamed.

Such claims aside, there is genuine evidence that inflammation plays a role in certain health conditions. In atherosclerosis, blood flow to the heart or the brain is blocked, resulting in a heart attack or a stroke. For a long time, atherosclerosis was thought to result mainly from eating fatty foods, which clogged the arteries. “Atherosclerosis was all about fats and grease,” Peter Libby, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, told me recently. “Most physicians saw atherosclerosis as a straight plumbing problem.”

During his cardiology training, Libby studied immunology, and he became fascinated with the work of Rudolf Virchow, a nineteenth-century German pathologist. Virchow speculated that atherosclerosis might be an active process, caused by inflamed blood vessels, not one caused simply by the accumulation of fat. In the mid-nineteen-nineties, in studies with mice, Libby, working in parallel with other groups of scientists, found that low-density lipoproteins—LDLs, those particles of “bad” cholesterol—can work their way into the lining of arteries. There, they sometimes trigger an inflammatory response, which can cause blood clots that block the artery. Libby and others began to understand that atherosclerosis wasn’t a mere plumbing problem but also an immune disease—“our body’s defenses turned against ourselves,” he told me.

Paul Ridker, a cardiovascular expert and a colleague of Libby’s at Harvard and Brigham and Women’s, moved the research beyond the laboratory. He found that many patients who’d had heart attacks, despite lacking factors such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and a history of smoking, had an elevated level of C-reactive protein, a molecule produced in response to inflammation, in their blood. After demonstrating, in a separate study, that cholesterol-reducing statins could also reduce C-reactive-protein levels, Ridker launched the Jupiter trial, in which people with elevated levels of C-reactive protein but normal cholesterol levels were given a placebo or a statin medication. In 2008, the published results showed that the subjects who received the statin saw their levels of C-reactive protein drop and were less likely three and a half years later to suffer a heart attack. This suggested that elevated cholesterol isn’t the only factor at work in cardiovascular disease, and that in some cases statins, acting as anti-inflammatory agents, could be used to treat the condition.

The benefit was modest: the statin treatment reduced the risk of heart attack in only about one per cent of the patients. Still, that figure is statistically significant, and for one in every hundred patients—a hundred in every ten thousand—it’s meaningful. An independent safety-monitoring board ended the study early, saying that it was unethical to continue once it was clear that statins provided a benefit not available to the subjects on the placebo. (Critics argue that shortening the trial, which was funded by a drug company, exaggerated the potential benefits and underestimated long-term harm, but the researchers strongly disagree.) The N.I.H. and other scientific groups are funding new studies to further explore whether anti-inflammatory drugs—for example, low doses of immunomodulatory agents that are used for treating severe arthritis—can help prevent cardiovascular disease.

Another chronic condition that has been linked to inflammation is Type II diabetes. People with this condition can’t adequately use insulin, a molecule that enables the body’s cells to take glucose out of the bloodstream and derive energy from it. Their organs fail and glucose builds to dangerous levels in the blood. Recently, researchers have found macrophages in the pancreases of people with Type II diabetes. The macrophages release inflammatory molecules that are thought to impair insulin activity. One of these inflammatory molecules is called interleukin-1, and in 2007 the New England Journal of Medicine reported on a clinical trial in which an interleukin-1 blocker proved to be modestly effective at lowering blood-sugar levels in Type II diabetics. This suggests that, by blocking inflammation, it might be possible to restore insulin activity and alleviate some of the symptoms of diabetes.