Managing Cardiometabolic Risk

Exercise and Systemic Inflammation

Systemic inflammation has recently been recognized as a common thread linking various cardiometabolic risk factors, including insulin resistance, obesity, and dyslipidemia(114, 115). For example, low-grade systemic inflammation has been tied to diabetes (116) and the metabolic syndrome (117). Chronic low-grade inflammation is generally used to describe the slight (2 to 3x) increase in the concentration of pro-inflammatory markers such as C-reactive protein (CRP), tumour necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), and interleukin-6 (IL-6). As the notion of inflammation in relation to cardiometabolic risk is fairly recent, the amount of literature on the effects of exercise on inflammation pales in comparison to that available for more established risk factors, such as insulin resistance (reviewed above).