"...the number of leukocytes was much, much higher in women with endometriosis regardless of whether they were receiving treatment or not. Leukocytes (pronounced loo-co-sites) aka white blood cells, they’re an important part of the immune system, usually the good guys, helping to fight off infection and remove harmful material from the body....The fact that there seems to be an excess of these cells in the peritoneal fluid of women with endometriosis makes it look like they were trying to help fight the endometriosis...Like the other leukocytes macrophages were normally the good guys, it was their job to destroy diseased or infected cells, by engulfing and digesting them and to signal other immune cells to come join the party. Looking over the notes from another case it turns out they hate endometriosis too, they react to the disease as if it were a wound, trying to do their job and ‘fix’ the injury but end up secreting factors that actually encourage the survival of endometriosis instead. Kinda like trying to put out a bonfire with petrol. Is that the end of the case though? Should we just lock up the macrophages and throw away the key? Maybe there’s more going on here, macrophages are trying to be the good guys, but something is telling macrophages to produces these inflammatory factors that help endometriosis...Within the cells of your body there are all sorts of different signals that tell a cell what to do and how to do it. Amongst these signals are ones that switch on genes and one such signalling mechanism, called the JNK signalling pathway, was found to be responsible for the inflammatory activity of macrophages. So the true culprit has been found, case closed? Not quite, endometriosis has many different accomplices and although one of the major ones has been identified there is still much work to do." http://endo-update.blogspot.com/
Pretty Bad A** !!!
Macrophages be like:
