抄録
The mechanism involved in the inflammatory process has been investigated by many workers. Biochemical and histological studies into the mechanism have been the favorite procedures among these investigators. Some of them have attempted to elucidate the inflammatory mechanism from the standpoint of possible biogenic mediators such as histamine, 5-hydroxytryptamine, bradykinin and proteases. Although these types of study have been successful in giving us refreshed recognition of the vast complexity of the phenomenon, the mechanism of inflammation per se as well as the mechanism of the action of anti-inflammatory agent are still largely open to further investigation.
Apart from such biochemical and histological approaches, one can deal with the gross aspect of inflammatory process by formulating mathematical models. Among very few accounts in the literature of biometric or mathematical approach toward inflammatory edema, Van Arman et al. (1) tried the quadratic fitting to the time-curves of yeast and carrageenin edemas in rats. Schilling (2) discussed in his review of wound healing that the inflammatory response is a similar phenomenon to that of growth and regeneration.
The mathematical model for the inflammatory process may be taken as a hybrid of a strictly deterministic process of inflammation and a random scattering due to animal to animal variation and to measurement error. As for the deterministic component or intrinsic nature involved in a wax and wane phenomenon, one may often assume a dynamic model consisting of the increasing and decreasing phases. The equations for population change and those for drug kinetics derived from multiple compartment theory (3) are of this sort. These biological phenomena are sometimes simulated to the electric model or to the hydrodynamic model to give better understanding.
We have preliminarily reported a simple model for the rat paw edema (4), which describes the time-course of the swelling volume as the reflection of the dynamic balance between the swelling and antiswelling forces.
The present paper deals with the formulation of the model and its fitting to the experimental data of the paw edemas produced by various inciters.
