Editorial: The Physiology of Inflammation—The Final Common Pathway to Disease (original) (raw)

2018, Frontiers in Physiology

The 19 original and review articles included in the research topic "Physiology of Inflammation-the common pathway to disease" collectively convey an updated perspective on a variety of physiologic and pathologic conditions that trigger inflammation and how this response develops and progresses affecting tissue functions, either contributing to protect the organism or, instead, being a damaging process that disrupts homeostasis and drives most chronic diseases. While acute inflammation is usually a self-limited process, chronic inflammation, excluding that associated with autoimmune diseases, is characterized by a low-grade persistent inflammatory response that frequently is not clinically evident, but can be detected by the presence of increased levels of cytokines, chemokines, prostaglandins, nitric oxide, proteases, and other inflammatory mediators both at the tissue and plasma levels (Minihane et al., 2015). Accumulating evidence associates low grade inflammation with aging and the development and progression of most chronic diseases, from metabolic disturbances, like diabetes mellitus, obesity and the metabolic syndrome, to neurodegenerative, musculoskeletal, renal, cardiovascular diseases, and even behavioral diseases,