Serum IL-15 in patients with early systemic sclerosis a potential novel marker of lung disease 英文参考文献.docVIP

Available online /content/9/5/R85 Research article Open Access Vol 9 No 5 Serum IL-15 in patients with early systemic sclerosis: a potential novel marker of lung disease Dirk M Wuttge, Marie Wildt, Pierre Geborek, Frank A Wollheim, Agneta Scheja and Anita ?kesson Department of Rheumatology, Lund University Hospital, S-221 85 Lund, Sweden Corresponding author: Dirk M Wuttge, dirk.wuttge@med.lu.se Received: 19 Jun 2007 Revisions requested: 27 Jul 2007 Revisions received: 9 Aug 2007 Accepted: 4 Sep 2007 Published: 4 Sep 2007 Arthritis Research Therapy 2007, 9:R85 (doi:10.1186/ar2284) This article is online at: /content/9/5/R85 ? 2007 Wuttge et al., licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/ 2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract The pathogenesis of systemic sclerosis (SSc) is characterized by autoimmunity, vasculopathy and fibrosis. IL-15 is a pleiotropic cytokine that has impact on immune, vascular and connective tissue cells. We therefore investigated IL-15 in the circulation of patients with early SSc and explored possible associations of serum IL-15 with vasculopathy and fibrosis. Serum levels of IL- 15 were analysed in 63 consecutive patients with SSc of disease duration less than 4 years and without disease- modifying treatment. Thirty-three age-matched healthy control individuals were enrolled. Serum IL-15 levels were increased in the sera of SSc patients compared with that of healthy control individuals (P 0.01). Serum IL-15 levels correlated with impaired lung function, assessed both by the vital capacity (P 0.05) and by the carbon monoxide diffusion capacity (P 0.05). The association between IL-15 and the vital capacity remained after multiple linear regression analysis. Patients with in