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Low levels of circulating IL‐21 in HIV‐infected AIDS patients
Author(s) -
Iannello Alexandre,
Toma Emil,
Ahmad Ali
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.22.2_supplement.500
Subject(s) - cytokine , immunology , immune system , medicine , human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) , interleukin 2 , t cell , ex vivo , in vivo , virology , biology , microbiology and biotechnology
Interleukin‐21 (IL‐21) is a relatively recently discovered type‐1 cytokine. It is a CD4+ T cell‐derived cytokine and has pleiotropic effects on the functions of immune cells. The cytokine bears special relevance to HIV infection as it is mainly produced by CD4+ T cells: the main targets of the virus. Therefore, we were interested in knowing how this cytokine is regulated in vivo in this viral infection. For this purpose, we measured IL‐21 by ELISA in the sera of 29 AIDS patients and compared them with a similar number of sera from age‐matched HIV‐seronegative healthy persons. Our data show that the sera from HIV‐infected patients had 2 fold less concentrations of IL‐21 as compared to the healthy subjects. Levels of circulating IL‐21 depended upon the quantity of CD4+ T cells present in the circulation of the patients. Thus, the patients with low numbers of CD4+ T cell counts showed lower levels of this cytokine as compared to the patients with higher CD4+ T cell counts. Indeed, a significant positive correlation existed between the numbers of CD4+ T cells and the levels of IL‐21 in sera from AIDS patients. To conclude, the depletion of CD4+ T cells during HIV infection results in low levels of circulating IL‐21 in HIV‐infected patients. The positive correlation between numbers of CD4+ T cells and concentrations of IL‐21 may suggest the use of this cytokine as a reliable hallmark for the progression of HIV‐induced AIDS.