Disease
Adverse effects of cytokines have been linked to many disease states and conditions ranging from major depression and Alzheimer's disease to cancer with levels either being elevated or changed. Over-secretion of cytokines can trigger a dangerous syndrome known as a cytokine storm; this may have been the cause of severe adverse events during a clinical trial of TGN1412. Cytokine storms also were the main cause of death in the 1918 "Spanish Flu" pandemic. Deaths were weighted more heavily towards people with healthy immune systems, due to its ability to produce stronger immune responses, like increasing cytokine levels. Another important example of cytokine storm is seen in acute pancreatitis. Cytokines are integral and implicated in all angles of the cascade resulting in the systemic inflammatory response syndrome and multi organ failure associated with this intra-abdominal catastrophe.
Read more about this topic: Adverse Reaction To Cytokines
Famous quotes containing the word disease:
“Whoever grows angry amid troubles applies a drug worse than the disease and is a physician unskilled about misfortunes.”
—Sophocles (497–406/5 B.C.)
“The inconveniences and horrors of the pox are perfectly well known to every one; but still the disease flourishes and spreads. Several million people were killed in a recent war and half the world ruined; but we all busily go on in courses that make another event of the same sort inevitable. Experientia docet? Experientia doesn’t.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)