The Midlife Inflammation Split: Why Your Sex and Race Quietly Reroute the Aging Clock Years Before Disease Shows Up (opens in new tab)

Tracking 68 middle-aged adults over roughly nine years, researchers found that “inflammaging” does not march upward uniformly. Several inflammatory markers — most notably hsCRP, ferritin, IL-22, and the chemokine CXCL11/ITAC — moved in opposite directions depending on sex and race, suggesting that the inflammatory trajectory through midlife is demographically branched rather than universal. Chronic, low-grade inflammation is one of the most reliable companions of aging — a slow smolder that h...