An investigation for IL-6 responses in patients with pandemic influenza A (H1N1) infection (168.20)

Abstract

Abstract The pandemic H1N1 or the swine flu virus infected many people in 2009, and contributed an important morbidity and mortality around the world. Unfortunately very few markers related to the prognosis during the course of the disease have been reported so far. The purpose of this study is to investigate serum levels of IL-6 for prognosis evaluation of H1N1. A total of 29 sera from 18 patients that were confirmed to be positive for H1N1 by real time PCR in The National Influenza Center in Turkey were studied for determination of IL-6 levels using ELISA. Two groups of serum specimens collected at different time points were evaluated. The first group was collected at the acute phase of the viral infection (0-7th days) while the second group was collected at the late phase (10-20th days). Only one patient with respiratory failure died. We found a dramatic difference (p<0.05) in levels of serum IL-6 between the early and the late phases of the infection. We also compared the serum IL-6 levels with the clinical symptoms obtained from patients who had a previous asthma history. The asthma patients and a patient with respiratory failure had significantly high levels (p< 0.05) of IL-6 during the course of the disease. These results indicated that serum levels of a pleiotropic cytokine IL-6 might be an important marker for prognosis of H1N1 infections.