How do corticosteroids work to reduce inflammation in the body?
Inflammation is the body’s natural response to events such as injury, infection, and the presence of foreign substances—things your body doesn’t recognize as a part of itself. Sometimes, however, as with lupus, your body’s immune system does not function properly, and the inflammatory response works to damage your own tissues, causing stiffness, swelling, warmth, pain, and tenderness in different parts of the body. Corticosteroids help to slow and stop the processes in your body that make the molecules involved in your inflammatory response. These steroids also reduce the activity of your immune system by affecting the function of cells in your blood called white blood cells. In reducing inflammation and immune response, corticosteroids help to prevent damage to the tissues in your body.
