IL17A and osteoporosis: IL-17 is a pro-inflammatory cytokine (Yao et al., 1995), and is regarded as a catalyst for the development of osteoporosis (Molnár et al., 2014; Zhao et al., 2016; Tang et al., 2020), acting primarily by indirectly promoting osteoclast formation (Amarasekara et al., 2018).