Posted by raybakes on November 29, 2004, at 6:44:21
sorry, getting carried away!
'The presence of high levels of interleukin-6 in states characterized by fatigue or somnolence, such as glucocorticoid deficiency [26], rheumatoid arthritis [59,63], and disorders of excessive daytime sleepiness [104]; the marked correlation of interleukin-6 with exercise-induced exhaustion (Papanicolaou DA, Singh A, Gold PW, Deuster PA, Chrousos GP. Exercise-induced fatigue correlates with plasma interleukin-6 [IL-6] levels in normal women. Presented at the Third International Congress of the International Society for Neuroimmunomodulation, 15 November 1996, Washington, DC); and the ability of interleukin-6 to cause fatigue [20,21] suggest that it may be a fatigue-mediating factor whose suppression or neutralization may help alleviate these symptoms when necessary. Humanized neutralizing anti-interleukin-6 antibodies or interleukin-6 receptor antagonists may be particularly helpful in rehabilitating patients with rheumatic diseases and debilitating fatigue [61].
A recent study [105] provided indirect evidence that interleukin-6 may be involved in the pathogenesis of myocardial infarction. Specifically, men who had elevated baseline levels of C-reactive protein, a surrogate for interleukin-6 action [106], were at greater risk for myocardial infarction than men who had normal levels of C-reactive protein. In addition, marked gliosis occurs in the brains of transgenic animals in which interleukin-6 is overexpressed in the central nervous system [45]; this indicates that this cytokine may participate in the neurodegeneration and gliosis seen in such conditions as AIDS encephalopathy [107,108] and Alzheimer disease [109,110]. Thus, potential suppressants of interleukin-6 secretion or interleukin-6 antagonists might be a promising adjuvant therapy for such states.
The ability of interleukin-6 to stimulate secretion of corticotropin-releasing hormone in a dose-dependent manner suggests that this cytokine could be used for the differential diagnosis of disorders associated with abnormalities of the corticotropin-releasing hormone neuron. Thus, an interleukin-6 stimulation test could be useful in differentiating between the Cushing syndrome and pseudo-Cushing syndrome states (such as the combination of obesity and melancholic depression or chronic active alcoholism and the alcohol withdrawal syndrome) and between atypical and melancholic depression. Such a differentiation would be based on the fact that the corticotropin-releasing hormone neuron is chronically suppressed in the Cushing syndrome and chronically activated in pseudo-Cushing syndrome states [111]. In addition, melancholic depression and atypical depression are on opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of activity of the corticotropin-releasing hormone neuron [112-115].'
http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/128/2/127
poster:raybakes
thread:421739
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/alter/20041123/msgs/421739.html