This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 4:54 am and is filed under Arthritis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
A BRIEFING ON THE ARTHRITIC PROCESS: WHY DOES IT KEEP GETTING WORSE?
In the case of arthritis, once macrophages have dealt with some particles of cartilage they develop a chemical message that’s passed on to the memory T-cells. If there’s only one message of that type, the memory T-cells ignore it, but if that message is repeated then they develop a program instructing more and more macrophages to dispose of the cartilage. Unfortunately, that message doesn’t (or maybe can’t) distinguish between healthy or unhealthy cartilage. So the destructive onslaught against your joints begins.
It seems that it is the inflammatory process itself that initiates the arthritic process, regardless of what triggers the inflammation. In other words, the arthritic process can start whether the particles of cartilage result from an attack by certain pathogenic micro-organisms (leading to rheumatoid arthritis) or by a trauma (developing into osteoarthritis)!
In either case, rheumatoid or osteoarthritis, it results in a vicious cycle. As more macrophages bring back messages to the memory T-cells, more and more T-cells develop programs that direct attacks against the cartilage and arthritis continues to get progressively worse. You almost never hear of arthritis getting better. Now you’ve learned why.
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