Actor Peter Falk ("Colombo") died recently of Alzheimers. While two different diseases, AD and PD have a lot in common. In the following article from today's British paper "The Daily Mail" you can just about replace AD with PD verbatim. And tumor necrosis factor is the most destructive of the cytokines.

<begin quote>
Did a trip to the dentist accelerate Columbo's Alzheimer's?

Yet at the beginning of 2007 he was still intellectually sharp enough to be working. But within weeks he ‘rapidly slipped into dementia after a series of dental operations’,....

A further deterioration followed in 2010 when he underwent hip-replacement surgery.....

Now, new research published in the journal Neurology could help to solve the mystery of how the actor became so ill so suddenly.

Researchers from Southampton University report compelling evidence that surgery, as well as injury and infection, can dramatically accelerate the disease and the rate of brain death in people who already have early Alzheimer’s disease.

The first stages of this type of dementia make the brain abnormally sensitive to the inflammatory proteins that the body produces to promote recovery, triggering severe Alzheimer....

The most significant of these proteins is tumor necrosis factor, a naturally-occurring substance that plays an essential role in the body’s immune response and the ability to recover from what doctors call ‘assaults’ on the body (bacterial or viral infections, injuries, surgery or heart attacks). It works by inducing ‘sickness behaviour’ such as a lack of energy, low mood and inability to concentrate.

‘As scientists, we’ve paid too little attention to this important process by which the brain responds to an infection or injury, by releasing a cascade of these inflammatory proteins into other parts of the body,’