Immune thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) is an autoimmune disorder, and high-dose dexamethasome (HD-DXM) has been used as a first-line therapy for patients with ITP. However, little is known about the role of dendritic cells (DCs) and CD4(+)Foxp3(+) regulatory T (Treg) cells in the pathogenesis of chronic ITP and the effects of HD-DXM on DCs and Treg cells. In this study, we investigated the amounts of circulating myeloid DCs (mDCs), plasmacytoid DCs (pDCs), and CD4(+)Foxp3(+) Treg cells in 26 untreated adult patients with chronic ITP. All patients had thrombocytopenia (platelet count <50 x 10(9)/L) for more than 6 months. We also observed short-time changes of DCs and Treg cells after treatment with HD-DXM in these patients. Both mDCs and pDCs numbers in patients were comparable with that of healthy controls. In contrast, the percentage of Treg cells was significantly reduced in patients when compared with healthy controls (P < 0.0001). After 4-days treatment with HD-DXM, Treg cells and mDCs were increased (P < 0.0001 and P < 0.05), while pDCs decreased (P < 0.0001), and CD11c expression level in mDCs was downregulated (P < 0.0001). These results suggest that Treg cells are deficient in ITP and the immunosuppressive therapy of glucocorticoids could cause the short-time changes of these cells.
Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is the most common acute leukemia in adults. The disease is characterized by various cytogenetic and molecular abnormalities with distinct prognoses and gene expression profiles. Emerging evidence has suggested that circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) could serve as noninvasive biomarkers for cancer detection; however, little is known about circulating miRNA profiles in AML patients. In this study, a genome-wide serum miRNA expression analysis was performed using Solexa sequencing for initial screen, followed by validation with real-time PCR assays. The analysis was conducted on training and verification sets of serum samples from 140 newly diagnosed AML patients and 135 normal adult donors. After a two-phase selection and validation process, 6 miRNAs, miR-10a-5p, miR-93-5p, miR-129-5p, miR-155-5p, miR-181b-5p and miR-320d, were found to have significantly different expression levels in AML compared with control serum samples. Furthermore, unsupervised clustering analysis revealed the remarkable ability of the 6-miRNA profile to differentiate between AML patients and normal controls. The areas under the ROC curve for the selected miRNAs ranged from 0.8129 to 0.9531. More importantly, miR-181b-5p levels in serum were significantly associated with overall survival. These data demonstrated that the expression patterns of circulating miRNAs were systematically altered in AML and miR-181b-5p may serve as a predictor for overall survival in AML patients.
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