Interleukin‐18 and gestosis: correlation with Helicobacter pylori seropositivity

Abstract

The aim of this brief communication was to determine the correlation between pre-eclampsia (PE), Helicobacter pylori pathogenic strains seropositivity, and interleukin-18 (IL-18) levels. To this purpose 25 pre-eclamptic women and 25 healthy parturient women of similar age were evaluated for: IL-18 levels, by ELISAH. pylori seropositivity, by anti-IgG ELISAAnti-Cag-A antibodies using a commercial immunoblot assay.We report similar values of IL-18 in our pre-eclamptic patients and in healthy parturient women (respectively 350 +/- 150 vs. 399 +/- 132 pg ml(-1); p = 0.23). However the seropositivity for H. pylori was 84 and 32% (p < 0.001), and anti-Cag-A antibodies were present respectively in 80 and 28% of the two populations. On the basis of our data we hypothesize that H. pylori infection from Cag-A strains can be involved in some cases of PE and that the microorganism could modulate IL-18 release. In fact, differences on IL-18 production have been described by different authors between pre-eclamptic and healthy pregnant women, independently from infective pathology.

Interleukin-18 and Interferon Gamma Levels in Preeclampsia: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

“…There is also one study that did not find difference in IL-18 concentrations between PE and controls. 16 Similar controversies exist regarding IFN-c. [17][18][19][20] Therefore, in view of these conflicting results and considerable importance of these two cytokines to PE, we conducted a metaanalysis to systematically review the current literature and hopefully could establish consensus trough examining the concentration changes of IL-18 and IFN-c in PE patients' serum/plasma.…”

“…For IL-18, form the 11 selected studies, four studies provided mean and S.D. 15,16,22,23 However, four studies only provided values of median and range. 14,[24][25][26] In these cases, the mean and S.D.…”

“…The number of patients with PE or eclampsia per study ranged from 14 to 300. Nine of the 11 studies used serum specimens to examine the IL-18 levels, [14][15][16]23,24,26,[28][29][30] and two studies were with plasma. 22,28 Eight of the 16 studies reported the use of plasma in the IFN-c assay, 17,19,20,31,36,37,40,42 while eight studies conducted in serum.…”

“…16,39 The total NOS score of each study is described in Table I. The factors that mostly affected the quality of the articles were the selection of controls and the non-response rate.…”

“…15,16,22,23 In addition, the mean and S.D. for IL-18 were evaluated by median and range in four studies, 14,24-26 and by mean and S.E.…”