ab17_2

Soluble intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1), CD4, CD8 and interleukin-2 receptor in patients with Behçet’s disease and Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada’s disease

E. Uchio¹, T. Matsumoto¹, S.-I. Tanaka², S. Ohno¹

¹Department of Ophthalmology and ²Third Department of Internal Medicine, Yokohama City University School of Medicine, Yokohama, Japan.

ABSTRACT
Objectives
In a search for serum markers of disease activity in uveitis, we measured the levels of the soluble form of ICAM-1 (sICAM-1), CD4 (sCD4), CD8 (sCD8) and interleukin-2 receptor (sIL-2R) in the serum of patients with Behçet’s disease (BD) and Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada’s disease (VKH).

Methods
The study population consisted of 20 patients with active BD (treated with tacrolimus), 15 patients with inactive BD, 24 patients with VKH [20 of them successfully treated with systemic corticosteroids (cured group) and 4 of them with two or more episodes of uveitis after withdrawal of systemic steroid (recurrence group)], and 20 normal individuals. The levels of serum sICAM-1, sCD4, sCD8 and sIL-2R were measured by sandwich ELISA.

Results
Sera from patients with BD in the convalescent stage showed significantly higher levels of sICAM-1 than those in the acute stage. Patients with active BD in both stages or VKH in the acute stage had significantly higher levels of serum sCD4 and sIL-2R than the controls. The levels of sCD8 in patients with both diseases in both stages differed significantly compared to the controls. No difference was noted in the pattern of decline of these soluble markers after treatment in the cured and recurrence groups of VKH patients. A positive correlation was found between the serum levels of sCD4 and sIL-2R in patients with both diseases in the acute stage.

Conclusions
The results suggest that these soluble markers may represent potentially useful parameters to monitor disease activity or chronic inflammation in certain types of autoimmune uveitis.

Key words
Soluble ICAM-1, soluble CD4, soluble CD8, soluble IL-2 receptor, Behçet’s disease, Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada’s disease.

This work was supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (09771456) from the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture of Japan.

Please address correspondence and reprint requests to: Eiichi Uchio, MD, Department of Ophthalmology, Yokohama City University School of Medicine, 3-9 Fuku-ura, Kanazawa-ku, Yokohama 236-0004, Japan.