TNF and neoplasm: Inflammation is a well-accepted risk factor for CRC affects most of the major processes that govern the evolution of a tumor including mutation, proliferation, apoptosis, vascularization, invasion and immune evasion.17 Here, colonic IL-6 and Tnf-α were positively correlated to the percentage of proliferative colonocytes (R = 0.37, P = .02 and R = 0.45, P = .005 respectively).