FRIDAY, Sept. 2, 2005 (HealthDay News) -- Some people recover well from traumatic injuries while others suffer dangerous inflammatory complications -- and new research may point to the reason why.
Researchers say that "systemic inflammation" -- an immune response to trauma affecting the entire body -- can prompt changes in thousands of genes within white blood cells, according to an article published in this week's issue of Nature.
"Some of the most serious problems facing patients with major burns or trauma result from out-of-control inflammation, a process we still do not understand well," Dr. Ronald Tompkins, chief of the Burns Service at Massachusetts General Hospital, said in a prepared statement.
"By looking at how people respond to injury on a genomic and proteomic level, we hope someday to be able to tailor treatments to patients' individual needs, and keep the inflammatory response from doing more harm than good," said Tompkins, who is also national leader of the Inflammation and Host Response to Injury program, a multi-institutional research collaborative.
In this first step, healthy volunteers were injected with a bacterial endotoxin that caused a widespread but controlled inflammatory response that subsided quickly.
Analyzing their inflammatory reaction, researchers found more than 3,700 genes in white blood cells that changed significantly, causing further interactions between more than 8,000 genes. Hundreds of the genes and pathways identified were not previously known to be associated with the inflammatory process, the researchers say.
More information
The National Institutes of Health has more about the immune system.
