> The ACC is now recommending that everyone measure inflammation (specifically, hs-CRP)
Burying the lede a little, here. The ACC has decided on a standard way to measure inflammation, which decades ago was a centerpiece of some very woo-woo "following the squizledoff diet will decrease your gomperblorp"-style health 'advice'. "Systemic inflammation" was a very tricky physiological parameter to nail down.
Do you have a link to an article that covers the history? In the time that I've been following this topic (about 10 years), hs-CRP has been the go-to biomarker of inflammation. It'd be interesting to learn about the process required to get there.
CRP and its subtypes have been known since 1930 as markers of acute inflammation such as following disease or injury. The measurement of chronic systemic inflammation is more difficult, because it involves lower levels of the biomarkers. So for example CRP levels increase by a factor of thousands when there is an infection, but in chronic systemic inflammation are elevated much more subtly. I don't know a great historical review but this "Nature Perspective" from 2019 seems pretty good:
Burying the lede a little, here. The ACC has decided on a standard way to measure inflammation, which decades ago was a centerpiece of some very woo-woo "following the squizledoff diet will decrease your gomperblorp"-style health 'advice'. "Systemic inflammation" was a very tricky physiological parameter to nail down.