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Serum levels of inflammatory cytokines in leprosy patients

Background

Measure the serum cytokine levels in untreated leprosy with different parts of the spectrum of leprosy.

Methods

Concentrations of IL-4, IL-6 and IL-12 in the serum of patients were determined with a commercially available enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kit (R&D Systems) according mannufactors instructions.

Results

We observed that mean of IL-4 and IL-6 were higher in lepromatous pole and IL-12 and TNF-α were higher in tuberculoid pole, but only IL-12 were statistic significantly. Our data also demonstrated that most of the patients present very lows or absent levels of TNF-α, IL-4 and IL-6.

Discussion

This is probably because leprosy is a chronic infectious disease and this profile cytokines is increase acute infections. Thus, studies of cytokine in leprosy have given us a more detailed description of the immunological parameters of the polar types of leprosy and play a significant role in classification and prognosis of this disease.

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Correspondence to Lúcia de Paula.

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Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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de Paula, L., Passos, I.M., da Silva, R.C. et al. Serum levels of inflammatory cytokines in leprosy patients. Retrovirology 7 (Suppl 1), P190 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-4690-7-S1-P190

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-4690-7-S1-P190

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