IL-1β, IL-6, IL-8 and TNFα are potent inflammatory mediators present within disc degeneration [12,13,15,17,18,35,41,58] and, as shown in this study, cytokines are able to mediate factors involved in innervation, pain transmission and angiogenesis; this confirms regulation of NGF and BDNF seen previously following cytokine treatments of IVD cells [26,30,32,34,59]. Here, IL1B is linked to intervertebral disk degenerative disorder.