Introduction to Basic Biology and Clinical Aspects of Inflammation

Abstract: Inflammation has been recognized as biological phenomena for more than 2000 years by the Roman physician Aulus Cornelius Celcus who described the four cardinal signs of inflammation heat (calor), redness (rubor), pain (dolour), and swelling (tumour), a fifth sign, the loss of function was added later [1]. Consequently, there is ample literature on this subject as illustrated by the fact that more than 500,000 publications on this subject are listed in PubMed. Nevertheless, this volume provides new relevant information on the topic of inflammation, demonstrating that we have not yet complete knowledge on this subject. The reader is directed to extensive introduction of the subject of inflammation [2] as well as many other reports which deals with this subject [3 - 10]. This introductory chapter provides a brief summary of the individual chapter contain in this book.

Keywords: Acute and Chronic Inflammation, Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (SIRS), Cell and Biochemical Mediators, Wound Healing, Metabolism and Aging, Allergy, Diabetes, Cardiovascular, Arthritis, Oral and Gastrointestinal, Neuroinflammation, Pharmacotherapy, Math Modeling and Network Analysis.