How Chronic Inflammation Can Trigger Autoimmune Disease

Let's review how cellular breakdown may result in autoimmune diseases!

Dear Kool Beens,

As you are aware, I have been busy creating diagrams for the book. The diagram above is also one of these. This is also the reason that I did not do my webinars. I thought I will share an important medical mechanism that will encourage us to keep chronic inflammation managed by lifestyle, diet, and other methods. The key concept is that chronic inflammation keeps breaking cells resulting in the cell's components exposed to the immune system which in turn results in some people for autoimmune diseases.

Here is the concept:

Chronic inflammation wears down tissues over time. When it keeps going unchecked, it doesn't just cause pain or swelling—it starts to damage the cells themselves. One major target is the nucleus, where our genetic material is stored. With repeated hits from inflammation, the nuclear membrane can start to break down. When that happens, nuclear components like DNA, histones, and other tightly guarded materials leak out into places they normally shouldn’t be.

Figure: a broken nucleus as a result of inflammation or other insult. Nuclear components, histones, DNA, and nuclear proteins are spilled out. These components become a target of the immune cells.

Now here’s where things go sideways. The immune system is trained to ignore the nucleus—it never "sees" it during normal development. But once those nuclear pieces are out in the open, immune cells can mistake them for foreign invaders. Dendritic cells pick them up, present them to T and B cells, and if someone is genetically prone to it, this can lead to the immune system creating antibodies against its own nuclear parts—what we call ANA, or antinuclear antibodies.

This is one of the ways autoimmunity can begin. It doesn’t always start this way, but chronic inflammation sets the stage. The more damage there is, the more these inner pieces of the cell leak out. And the more the immune system sees them, the more likely it is to respond. Over time, this can turn into a self-sustaining loop where the immune system keeps attacking the body—triggering conditions like lupus or mixed connective tissue disease.