Fascinating tour of inflammatory biology
Eight pages on PainSci cite Medzhitov 2008: 1. Icing for Injuries, Tendinitis, and Inflammation 2. The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome 3. The Complete Guide to Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome 4. Complete Guide to Plantar Fasciitis 5. Pseudo-Quackery in Physical Therapy 6. Guide to Repetitive Strain Injuries 7. Massage Does Not Reduce Inflammation 8. Don’t count inflammation out of tendinopathy quite yet
PainSci commentary on Medzhitov 2008: ?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided wherever possible.
Fascinating high-level tour of the subject of inflammation, highlighting the extreme diversity of biomarkers and processes, and many still blank spots on the science map. Particularly relevant to musculoskeletal health, Medhitov explains that the “inflammation” going on in tissues that are chronically stressed — as in repetitive strain injury — are basically mysterious and quite different from the “classic” inflammatory response we see in infection and trauma, and “It is unclear how applicable knowledge of infection-induced inflammation is to other types of inflammation.” Highly recommended reading for professionals.
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
Inflammation underlies a wide variety of physiological and pathological processes. Although the pathological aspects of many types of inflammation are well appreciated, their physiological functions are mostly unknown. The classic instigators of inflammation — infection and tissue injury — are at one end of a large range of adverse conditions that induce inflammation, and they trigger the recruitment of leukocytes and plasma proteins to the affected tissue site. Tissue stress or malfunction similarly induces an adaptive response, which is referred to here as para-inflammation. This response relies mainly on tissue-resident macrophages and is intermediate between the basal homeostatic state and a classic inflammatory response. Para-inflammation is probably responsible for the chronic inflammatory conditions that are associated with modern human diseases.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
- Common interventional procedures for chronic non-cancer spine pain: a systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomised trials. Wang 2025 BMJ.
- Gabapentinoids and Risk of Hip Fracture. Leung 2024 JAMA Netw Open.
- Classical Conditioning Fails to Elicit Allodynia in an Experimental Study with Healthy Humans. Madden 2017 Pain Med.
- Topical glyceryl trinitrate (GTN) and eccentric exercises in the treatment of mid-portion achilles tendinopathy (the NEAT trial): a randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial. Kirwan 2024 Br J Sports Med.
- Placebo analgesia in physical and psychological interventions: Systematic review and meta-analysis of three-armed trials. Hohenschurz-Schmidt 2024 Eur J Pain.