The intervertebral disk degeneration (IDD) and its associated conditions are an important problem in modern medicine. The onset of IDD may be in childhood and adolescence in patients with a genetic predisposition. IDD progresses with age, leading to spondylosis, spondylarthrosis, intervertebral disk herniation, and spinal stenosis. The purpose of this review is an attempt to summarize the data characterizing the patterns of production of pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines in IDD and to appreciate the prognostic value of cytokine imbalance as its biomarker. This narrative review demonstrates that the problem of evaluating the contribution of pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines to the maintenance or alteration of cytokine balance may be a new key to unlocking the mystery of IDD development and new therapeutic strategies for the treatment of IDD in the setting of acute and chronic inflammation. The presented data support the hypothesis that cytokine imbalance is one of the most important biomarkers of IDD.

Intervertebral disc degeneration (IDD) and associated conditions are an important problem in modern medicine. The onset of IDD may be in childhood and adolescence in patients with a genetic predisposition. With age, IDD progresses, leading to spondylosis, spondylarthrosis, herniated disc, spinal canal stenosis. One of the leading mechanisms in the development of IDD and chronic back pain is an imbalance between pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines. However, classical therapeutic strategies for correcting cytokine imbalance in IDD do not give the expected response in more than half of the cases. The purpose of this review is to update knowledge about new and promising therapeutic strategies based on the correction of the molecular mechanisms of cytokine imbalance in patients with IDD. This review demonstrates that knowledge of the molecular mechanisms of the imbalance between pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines may be a new key to finding more effective drugs for the treatment of IDD in the setting of acute and chronic inflammation.

The purpose of this review was to study domestic and foreign studies and update knowledge about the frequency of the low back pain (LBP) occurrence among adults. The available full-text English and Russian publications from the following databases were analyzed: PubMed, Springer, Wiley Online Library, Taylor & Francis Online, US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, ScienceDirect and eLIBRARY.RU. The search for publications was carried out by the following keywords and their combinations: low back pain; back pain; discogenic pain; neuropathic pain; lumbodynia; sacralgia; intervertebral discs pathology. The search depth is 5 years (from 2016 to 2021). 2082 publications were analyzed, 132 of them corresponded to the purpose of this study, 21 of them were full-text publications. In total, 21 studies have been analyzed over the past 5 years. In the Russian Federation and abroad. The average LBP frequency ranged from 0.05% in Israel to 83% in Sweden. Such a large spread of indicators may be due to several objective reasons: differences in the design and methods of the study; heterogeneity of samples by age (adolescents, young, adults, middle-aged and elderly); only men taking part in the study; differences in social status (students, military personnel, athletes, working pensioners). In this regard, it impossible to systematize the results of the studies analyzed by us. Our thematic review shows that LBP in modern neurology remains one of the most common pathology, despite the improvement of health care system, preventive and predictive medicine.