A Novel Outlook on the Correlation Between Acute and Chronic Inflammatory States, a Retrospective Observational Study

Introduction: Continuum theory states that suppression of efficient acute inflammation is one of the mechanisms responsible for the onset of chronic low-grade inflammation, and in the presence of chronic inflammation, an organism is not capable of an efficient acute inflammatory response to pathogenic stimuli. Materials and methods: We investigated medical records from a large clinical database to assess whether chronic and acute inflammation were mutually exclusive. To evaluate this question, we gathered data on age, current diagnosis, comorbidities and last high fever. Results: A total of 927 cases of chronic inflammatory diseases were investigated. A strong association was found between increasing age and a reduction in concurrent acute and chronic inflammation (chi-squared statistic 51.26; p< .00001). Twenty-one individual cases were examined for the pattern of acute and chronic inflammatory diseases. In most cases, there was a clear increase in acute inflammatory conditions as chronic diseases improved. Conclusions: This retrospective study showed a strong association of decreasing concurrent acute and chronic inflammatory states with increasing age, and a possible mutual exclusivity of efficient acute and chronic inflammation was indicated. Since ageing is a low-grade chronic inflammatory process, it is possible that chronic inflammation precludes efficient acute inflammation, which indicates that there is a need to reconsider the manner of handling of acute inflammation in the population.