hs-CRP: The Inflammation Marker Hiding in Plain Sight

C-reactive protein is produced by the liver in response to inflammation, and the high-sensitivity version of the test, hs-CRP, can detect the kind of low-grade chronic inflammation that standard CRP tests are too blunt to pick up. This chronic, low-level inflammation has been implicated in the development of atherosclerosis, insulin resistance, and several other age-related conditions well before any of them become clinically diagnosable.

Landmark trials have shown that people with elevated hs-CRP but otherwise normal cholesterol still faced meaningfully higher cardiovascular event rates, and that reducing inflammation independently of cholesterol lowered that risk. This shifted how some researchers think about cardiovascular prevention, treating inflammation as a separate, addressable risk factor rather than a downstream symptom of high cholesterol alone.

Why this matters for tracking: hs-CRP is a cheap, widely available blood test that can surface silent inflammatory load, giving you an actionable data point well before it would show up as a diagnosable condition.