Abstract
This study sought to reveal the significance of IL-6 in papillary thyroid carcinoma by determining its circulating levels, tumoral protein, and mRNA expressions. As compared to the healthy individuals, serum IL-6 was significantly higher in patients with benign thyroid diseases and PTC. Further, its level was significantly higher in PTC patients as compared to patients with benign thyroid diseases. ROC curves also confirmed a good discriminatory efficacy of serum IL-6 between healthy individuals and patients with benign thyroid diseases and PTC. The circulating IL-6 was significantly associated with poor overall survival in PTC patients. IL-6 immunoreactivity was significantly high in PTC patients as compared to the benign thyroid disease patients. Significantly higher IL-6 mRNA expression was also observed in the primary tumour tissues of PTC patients than the adjacent normal tissues. The protein expression of IL-6 at both the circulating and tissue level correlated with disease aggressiveness in PTC patients. Moreover, a significant positive correlation was observed between the IL-6 protein and mRNA expression in the primary tumours of PTC patients. Finally in conclusion, IL-6 has an important role in thyroid cancer progression. Thus targeting IL-6 signalling can help in clinical management of thyroid carcinoma patients.
Highlights
IL-6 is apleiotropic cytokine having a central role in the regulation of inflammatory and immune responses [1]
With respect to IL-6 mRNA expression, disease free survival (DFS) was evaluated in 54/60 papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) patients as the rest of six patients had persistent disease and were not included for the DFS analysis, while all sixty patients were included for overall survival (OS) analysis
As compared to the healthy individuals, serum IL-6 was significantly higher in both patients with benign thyroid diseases (P = 0.004) and PTC (P = 0.002)
Summary
IL-6 is apleiotropic cytokine having a central role in the regulation of inflammatory and immune responses [1]. It is secreted by different cell types including macrophages, T and B lymphocytes, fibroblasts, endothelial cells, and cancer cells [2]. Numerous studies indicate that IL-6 and its related signalling pathways have been identified to contribute to proliferation, migration, and invasion of various tumour cells [5,6,7,8,9] and its expression is associated with poor prognosis in many types of cancers [10,11,12]. IL-6 signalling has been investigated as a potential target for several types of cancer therapies [22, 23]
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