Chronic inflammation appears to raise risk across the board for the diseases of aging - it is a source of damage to the cellular machinery that is you. Here, ScienceDaily looks at an advance in understanding why inflammation leads to a greater risk of cancer: "Cellular defense is a rapid process compared to cellular development [but] safeguarding against threats and building structures have certain steps in common and require similar types of workers, or molecules. ... the parallel sets of steps in cellular defense and development [are] not distinct from one another because they are linked by a protein called p100. ... inflammation leads to an increase in p100, but that p100 is also used in certain steps in development. ... Studies with animals have shown that a little inflammation is necessary for the normal development of the immune system and other organ systems. We discovered that the protein p100 provides the cell with a way in which inflammation can influence development. But there can be too much of a good thing. In the case of chronic inflammation, the presence of too much p100 may overactivate the developmental pathway, resulting in cancer."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/01/070125122719.htm
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