Evaluation of T-Bet immunostaining in the counting of intraepithelial lymphocytes in celiac disease

Abstract

Objective: In this study, we aimed to evaluate CD3, T-bet and GATA3 staining of intraepithelial lymphocytes (IELs) in comparison to the routine H&E stains in celiac disease.
 Methods: a total of 50 patients, in whom celiac disease was diagnosed based on a combination of clinicopathological features, were enrolled in the study. Duodenal biopsied tissues were processed routinely into formalin fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) blocks. Sections were prepared and stained with H&E and each of CD3, T-bet and GATA3. A number of histological criteria were measured to calculate the Marsh score. The results were analyzed using the IBM SPSS analytic software.
 Results: a positive correlation was found between the count of T-bet stained cells and the increase of intraepithelial lymphocytes (P-value = 0.001). In addition, low count of GATA3 stained cells was seen in almost all cases. The count of GATA3 stained cells was not affected by the increase in IELs count.
 Conclusions: the majority of increased IELs were stained with T-bet. Whereas in normal IELs count is less than half the IELs were stained with T-bet. This would indicate that T-bet immunostaining is a potential alternative to H&E and/or CD3 based counting of IELs.