Background: Alveolar echinococcosis (AE) is a cosmopolitan zoonotic parasitic disease caused by Echinococcus multilocularis larval tapeworm infections in humans that severely impairs the health of affected patients. Methods: The expression levels of 20 cytokines associated with AE infection were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, and the correlations between these cytokines were analysed in the R programming language. Results: Serum cytokine levels differed among individuals in both the AE patient and healthy control groups. Related studies have shown that different cytokines are associated with AE. Therefore, we investigated the correlations among the cytokines; these correlations were simple in the healthy control group butcomplex in the AE patient group. Th2 cytokines, such as interferon (IFN)-γ, interleukin (IL)-1β and monocyte chemoattractant protein (MCP)-1, had high betweenness centrality in AE patients, whereas Th1 cytokines, such as growth-regulated oncogene (GRO)-α, eotaxin and IL-5, had high betweenness centrality in the healthy control group. Conclusions: The altered correlations between Th1 and Th2 cytokines may be closely associated with AE progression.
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