David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, 10833 Le Conte Ave, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA.
CytoAnalytics, Denver, CO, 80113, USA.
J Transl Med. 2019 Jun 11;17(1):196. doi: 10.1186/s12967-019-1947-7.
Current syphilis tests cannot distinguish between active and past syphilis among patients with serofast rapid plasma reagin (RPR) titers. We investigated whether cytokine profiles might provide insight in the differentiation of active and treated syphilis.
We collected quarterly serum samples from participants at risk for incident syphilis in a prospective cohort study of men and male-to-female transgender women. We defined incident syphilis as a new RPR titer ≥ 1:8 or a fourfold increase from a prior RPR titer and a positive Treponema pallidum particle agglutination assay. We measured cytokine expression using a 63-multiplex bead-based Luminex assay (eBiosciences/Affymetrix, San Diego, California, USA). We used tertile bins and Chi square tests to identify differences in proportions of cytokines between samples from patients with active and treated syphilis. We constructed a network of cytokine profiles from those findings. We used R software (R version 3.4.1, R, Vienna, Austria) to fit models.
We identified 20 pairs of cytokines (out of 1953 possible pairs) that differed between active and treated syphilis. From those, we identified three cytokine networks of interest: an Eotaxin-Rantes-Leptin network, a Mig-IL1ra-Trail-CD40L network, and an IL12p40-IL12p70 network.
Differences in cytokine profiles are present among men and male-to-female transgender women with active and treated syphilis. Cytokine assays may be a potentially useful tool for identifying active syphilis among patients with serologic syphilis reactivity.
目前的梅毒检测无法区分血清固定快速血浆反应素（RPR）滴度患者的活动性梅毒和既往梅毒。我们研究了细胞因子谱是否可以为鉴别活动性和治疗性梅毒提供帮助。
我们从一项前瞻性队列研究的男性和男-女跨性别女性的梅毒感染风险人群中，每季度采集血清样本。我们将新发梅毒定义为新的 RPR 滴度≥1:8 或 RPR 滴度较前升高 4 倍，且梅毒螺旋体颗粒凝集试验阳性。我们使用 63 多重微珠流式细胞术（eBiosciences/Affymetrix，圣地亚哥，加利福尼亚，美国）来测量细胞因子表达。我们使用三分位数箱和卡方检验来确定活性和治疗性梅毒患者样本中细胞因子比例的差异。我们根据这些发现构建了细胞因子谱网络。我们使用 R 软件（R 版本 3.4.1，R，维也纳，奥地利）来拟合模型。
我们鉴定了 20 对细胞因子（在 1953 对可能的细胞因子对中），它们在活动性和治疗性梅毒之间存在差异。在这些细胞因子中，我们确定了三个有意义的细胞因子网络：Eotaxin-Rantes-Leptin 网络、Mig-IL1ra-Trail-CD40L 网络和 IL12p40-IL12p70 网络。
在活动性和治疗性梅毒的男性和男-女跨性别女性中，细胞因子谱存在差异。细胞因子检测可能是一种有用的工具，可用于识别血清学梅毒反应性患者中的活动性梅毒。
