The more we continue to learn about the inflammatory process the more we realized how complicated it is. A good example is the research that has been done on the inflammatory process and its affects on stroke. The article The Inflammatory Response in Stroke written by Wang reviews all the finding in the research that has been done so far. There are so many different players and many are reviewed in the article. First they review the cellular processes which include leukocytes, microglia the macrophages of the brain, and astrocytes. Secondly it goes over the adhesion molecules which include selectins, immunoglobulin family and integrins. The inflammatory markers are gone over commenting on cytokines, chemokines, arachidonic acid metabolites through two different pathways, nitric oxide, reactive oxygen species and matrix metalloproteinase. Lastly the transcriptional regulation through nuclear factor kB, mitogen activated protein kinase and activator protein-1.
In this review you get lost in all the details since there are so many different components to the inflammatory response. Which also is hard for researchers because there can be so many variables in an experiment. When reviewing each component they go into how each can be either beneficial and detrimental to the the outcome of strokes. This depends on when the events happen either right away or later into recovery. It also depend on the severity of the inflammation response and how the components affect it. For example there are cytokines that heighten inflammation process for example IL-6 and also ones that decrease it, IL-10. That is why it is so hard for researches to zoom into one specific factor that can be the culprit and it continues to be as confusing and intricate.
I think the major problem with current scientific research is the specificity of most research. Many scientists look at one particular factor by knocking it out or overexpressing it and looking at the effects it has on a particular problem they're researching. The problem comes from the fact that in the body these factors don't act by themselves. Crosstalk between factors, interaction with other substances, and tissue specificity can all play roles in the biological response a factor will induce. I agree that isolating factors and manipulating its expression is a useful tool; after all I use it in my own research as well. I hope in the coming years science will lean more towards looking at the interaction of factors on a variety of biological responses and less on the direct effect of one factor for one specific biological response.
ReplyDeleteI agree that research is hard for researchers to find the problems because they are looking at the specificity in the study. Unfortunately if they were to look at more than one thing and not knock out the other variables we wouldn't know if the data supports our hypothesis or not because we wouldn't be able to determine what exactly did what. In science we don't prove anything we either disprove or support our hypothesis. Unfortunately science has a lot of which came first, the chicken or the egg, and if we were to look at more than one item in an experiment we wouldn't have complete support for our hypothesis.
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