Chronic inflammation involves innate immune cells making damaging agents like oxidants, creating a feedback loop that further damages cells and tissue.

“The innate immune system isn't very intelligent. It's designed to kill non-specifically so these innate immune cells make hydrogen peroxide, nitric oxide, bleach. Exactly, the whole idea is just to kill non-specifically until your adaptive immune system can figure out what precisely needs to be killed. So that's your T cells and antibody response, but that takes a few days so you need both. [...] That's right because these are damaging agents and so it becomes like a feedback loop. You have going to cells that are being exposed to these mostly oxidants”