ABSTRACT
Inammatory diseases include infection/sepsis, trauma, inammatory bowel diseases, chronic wounds, rheumatologic disorders, and asthma; many other diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and obesity, are also associated with dysregulated inammation. Inammation can be thought of as acute (in settings such as sepsis, trauma, and wound healing) or chronic (in diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, etc.). Previously, chronic and acute inammatory processes were thought to be driven by different causes, through the activities of different cells and inammatory mediators, and to result in quite different ultimate outcomes. However, a more modern view suggests that these processes are interlinked (Figure 1.1) [66] and have evolved to give organisms the robustness and exibility to deal with diverse insults as well as regulating key homeostatic processes [39, 80, 85, 109, 143]. Moreover, inammation is linked to stress and cellular damage/dysfunction, not merely to overt tissue damage [24, 96].
