IL6 and neoplasm: Firstly, that an elevated C-reactive protein identifies tumours capable of producing significant amounts of proinflammatory cytokines, in particular interleukin-6 (Kinoshita et al, 1999; McKeown et al, 2004) and therefore with the potential for more rapid growth of tumour cells (Jee et al, 2001; Trikha et al, 2003).