IRON BEHAVING BADLY: INAPPROPRIATE IRON CHELATION AS A MAJOR CONTRIBUTOR TO THE AETIOLOGY OF VASCULAR AND OTHER PROGRESSIVE INFLAMMATORY AND DEGENERATIVE DISEASES Douglas B. Kell School of Chemistry and Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre, The University of Manchester, 131 Princess St, MANCHESTER M1 7DN, UK
[email protected] www.dbkgroup.org www.mcisb.ac.uk Background and preamble This is an unusual experiment in the Open Access scientific publication of a longish pre-print. Its story is as follows. (The Table of Contents is on p3.) While visiting Columbia University to present a seminar in May 2007, I met Jon Barrasch, who described, and got me interested in, his work on NGAL and kidney disease. We discussed some ideas for experiments. On my return, I started reading into this literature to do my homework, found it fascinating, started making notes, and eventually determined that: • many of the features of kidney disease were replicated in a great many other diseases • the literatures of these different diseases barely overlapped but there were clear themes, such as oxidative stress and inflammation, that were common to them • when one looked for additional evidence of a contribution of poorly liganded iron to this oxidative stress there was in many case a considerable literature pointing up its involvement • even when I thought I had trawled the literature exhaustively I continued (and still continue) to find highly pertinent papers, even papers in major journals that have been cited many times; this problem is exacerbated by the fact that most journals restrict the number of citations • this ‘balkanisation’ of the literature is also in part due to the amount of it (some 25,000 journals with presently 2.5 million peer-reviewed papers per year, i.e.