BDNF and neurodegenerative disease: Inflammatory cytokines and growth factors such as interleukin-6 (IL-6), interleukin-1β (IL-1β), brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) have been also demonstrated to play important roles in both the development of cancers and neurodegenerative diseases (Ogunmokun et al. 2021; Sochal et al. 2022).