Abstract
Endometriosis is a benign but troublesome gynecological condition, characterized by endometrial-like tissue outside the uterine cavity. Lately, the discovery and validation of noninvasive diagnostic biomarkers for endometriosis is one of the main priorities in the field. As the disease elicits a chronic inflammatory reaction, we focused our interest on two factors well known to be involved in inflammation and neoplastic processes, namely, soluble CD40 Ligand and CXCL1, and asked whether differences in the serum levels of sCD40L and CXCL1 in endometriosis patients versus controls can serve as noninvasive disease markers. A total of n = 60 women were included in the study, 31 endometriosis patients and 29 controls, and the serum levels of sCD40L and CXCL1 were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Overall, there were no statistically significant differences in the levels of expression of both sCD40L and CXCL1 between patients and controls. This study adds useful clinical data showing that the serum levels of the soluble factors sCD40L and CXCL1 are not associated with endometriosis and are not suitable as biomarkers for disease diagnosis. However, we found a trend toward lower levels of sCD40L in the deep infiltrating endometriosis subgroup making it a potentially interesting target worth further investigation.
Highlights
Endometriosis is a common gynecologic disorder that affects between 6 and 10% of women in their reproductive years [1]
As the disease elicits a chronic inflammatory reaction, we focused our interest on two factors well known to be involved in inflammation and neoplastic processes, namely, soluble CD40 Ligand and CXCL1, and asked whether differences in the serum levels of sCD40L and CXCL1 in endometriosis patients versus controls can serve as noninvasive disease markers
A total of n = 60 women were included in the study, 31 endometriosis patients and 29 controls, and the serum levels of sCD40L and CXCL1 were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay
Summary
Endometriosis is a common gynecologic disorder that affects between 6 and 10% of women in their reproductive years [1]. An analysis of the peritoneal fluid of patients with endometriosis [3] showed differences in the expression pattern of chemokines, cytokines, and other proteins, compared to controls [4, 5], suggesting an altered microenvironment in the peritoneal cavity of endometriosis patients [6] that encouraged the development and persistence of endometriotic lesions [7, 8] Based on this proinflammatory state of the ectopic lesion environment, endometriosis is often considered a condition that demonstrates patterns similar to that of a chronic systemic inflammatory disease [9]. The combination of several differentially expressed factors appears to be the most promising approach in the search for a signature that would indicate a more precise suspicion and/or diagnosis of endometriosis [12, 14]
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