Читать книгу Anti-Inflammatory Diet For Dummies - Artemis Morris - Страница 52

Neurodegenerative diseases affect a lot of the ways your body works: balance, movement, heart function — even talking and breathing. The brain moderates and controls each of these activities. When your brain is under attack, these seemingly easy tasks become cumbersome and, sometimes, nearly impossible.

Old scientific belief held the body’s and brain’s immune system had no bearing on each other — the two systems didn’t communicate with each other because each system had barriers that kept the other at bay.

Today, science believes that although these barriers still exist, they may be compromised in brain diseases, and that thanks to inflammatory responses within the body, the two systems do, in fact, communicate. This is called the gut-brain connection, and it is a two-way street.

Researchers have come a long way in connecting inflammation to neurodegenerative diseases; a 2017 Harvard Medical School study acknowledged an increasing awareness of the link between inflammation and conditions affecting the central nervous system (CNS). Some of the diseases they saw linked to inflammation were Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and Huntington’s disease.

In this section, we take a look at the role inflammation has in these diseases.