| Popis: |
Although nowadays ignored by clinicians, the use of copper in medicine has been a common practice for thousands of years, and the intuitive reasoning of its importance as an ‘exogenous’ anti-inflammatory agent dates back to the classic Roman age as clearly expressed, for the first time, in the Celsus’ medical book De Medicina [1]. Modern biomedical research has confirmed Celsus’ intuition, also discovering that the so-called ‘endogenous” copper (i.e. the metal naturally contained in the body) plays an important role in modulating the inflammatory response. In fact, the hypotheses which seem possible to outline on the basis of our knowledge today suggest that: (a) endogenous copper may act as part of the physiological ‘anti-inflammatory’ replay triggered by the organism to keep inflammation under proper control [2,3]; (b) the inflammation is a state in which more copper is demanded and accumulated by the organism to face the inflammatory noxa [4,5]; and (c) although inflammation is per se able to cause an increase in the amount of endogenous copper, this defensive response could be somehow insufficient to effectively control the inflammatory reaction, as suggested by the fact that copper preparations have remarkable anti-inflammatory and antiarthritic properties [6,7]. |
