chronic inflammation tagged posts

Diabetes affects more than 40 million people in the United States, according to the American Diabetes Association. For many, the chronic condition means a lifetime of pain as worsening circulation leads to nonhealing ulcers in the extremities, especially the legs and feet.

Chronic inflammation, difficulty in forming nutrient-carrying capillaries, and overzealous immune cells that attack healing tissue all combine to make diabetic foot ulcers one of the most difficult wounds to treat...

In humans and other multicellular organisms, cells multiply. This defining feature allows embryos to grow into adulthood, and enables the healing of the many bumps, bruises and scrapes along the way.

Certain factors can cause cells to abandon this characteristic and enter a zombie-like state known as senescence where they persist but no longer divide to make new cells. Our bodies can remove these senescent cells that tend to pile up as we age. The older we get, however, the less efficient our immune systems become at doing so.

“In addition to no longer growing and proliferating, the other hallmark of senescent cells is that they have this inflammatory program causing them to secrete inflammatory molecules,” said Peter Adams, Ph.D...

Scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine discovered a previously unknown link between two key pathways that regulate the immune system in mammals — a finding that impacts our understanding of chronic inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). This family of disorders severely impacts the health and quality of life of more than 2 million people in the United States.

The immune system has many pathways to protect the body from infection, but sometimes an overactive immune response results in autoimmune diseases including IBD, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple scler...

University of Virginia Health neuroscientists have discovered a potential way to disrupt the chronic inflammation responsible for multiple sclerosis.

UVA’s new study identifies a vital contributor to the hyperactive autoimmune response and neuroinflammation that are the hallmarks of MS. Blocking this lynchpin in a research model of MS alleviated the inflammation, giving researchers a prime target in developing new treatments for multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases.

The research was conducted by Andrea Merchak, a doctoral candidate in neuroscience, and her colleagues in the lab of Alban Gaultier of the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s Department of Neuroscience and its Ce...