Corticosteroids are anti-inflammatory medicines. They are man-made medicines, but look and work a lot like “cortisol,” an important hormone that your body produces naturally.
Corticosteroids affect many parts of the immune system. In addition to blocking some of the same inflammatory chemicals as NSAIDs, their most important effects are on neutrophils (a type of white blood cell) and T-cells (a type of lymphocyte, also a type of white blood cell). By doing so, they decrease the production of a number of other proteins that cause inflammation, called cytokines (e.g., TNF-alpha, IL-1, IL-2, IL-6, among others).
