Surgical inflammation: a pathophysiological rainbow
- PDF / 1,080,062 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 610 x 792 pts Page_size
- 78 Downloads / 240 Views
BioMed Central
Open Access
Review
Surgical inflammation: a pathophysiological rainbow Jose-Ignacio Arias1, María-Angeles Aller2 and Jaime Arias*2 Address: 1General Surgery Unit, Monte Naranco Hospital, Oviedo, Asturias, Spain and 2Surgery I Department, School of Medicine, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain Email: Jose-Ignacio Arias - [email protected]; María-Angeles Aller - [email protected]; Jaime Arias* - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 23 March 2009 Journal of Translational Medicine 2009, 7:19
doi:10.1186/1479-5876-7-19
Received: 4 March 2009 Accepted: 23 March 2009
This article is available from: http://www.translational-medicine.com/content/7/1/19 © 2009 Arias et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract Tetrapyrrole molecules are distributed in virtually all living organisms on Earth. In mammals, tetrapyrrole end products are closely linked to oxygen metabolism. Since increasingly complex trophic functional systems for using oxygen are considered in the post-traumatic inflammatory response, it can be suggested that tetrapyrrole molecules and, particularly their derived pigments, play a key role in modulating inflammation. In this way, the diverse colorfulness that the inflammatory response triggers during its evolution would reflect the major pathophysiological importance of these pigments in each one of its phases. Therefore, the need of exploiting this color resource could be considered for both the diagnosis and treatment of the inflammation.
Background The inflammatory response related to surgery (elective or anesthetized injury) and to trauma (accidental or unanesthetized injury) could be considered a surgical inflammation [1]. The surgical inflammation, as an inflammatory process, could be viewed as composed of a series of overlapping successive phases [2]. That is why it is common that each researcher chooses for his study a specific aspect of this complex response. At the same time, the interrelation of the knowledge that is successively obtained allows for better understanding the pathophysiological mechanisms of the surgical inflammation. It also allows for suggesting new possible meanings of this inflammatory response. Color is a quality of the surgical inflammation that has always been observed. The color in inflammation is one of the components by which the classical description of inflammation accounts for the visual changes observed. Based on visual observation, the ancients characterized
inflammation by four cardinal signs, namely redness, swelling, heat and pain [3]. It could be considered that the color of the injured tissue is changeable because both the traumatic injury (contusion and/or wound) and the inflammatory response related to this aggression are evolu
Data Loading...
