Abstract
Background: Acute leukemia is the most common hema-tological malignancy in adults, characterized by distorted proliferation of immature bone marrow-derived cells (BM blasts) that may also involve peripheral blood or solid organs. Blood cells and their marrow based progenitors are exquisitely responsive to their environment, and cytokines are an essential part of it. The overexpression of cytokines in leukemia patients declines in complete remission suggesting that these events are dependent on AML activity, possibly due to autonomous blast cytokine secretion.
Methods: Using ELISA kit, serum levels of IL-6, IL-10 were estimated before and after induction chemotherapy in 30 patients with AML from February 2015 to May 2016 from Clinical Oncology Department, Hematological Diseases Unit in Internal Medicine Department, Assiut University Hospital and Medical Oncology Department, South Egypt Cancer Institute and 20 age and sex matched healthy controls were also enrolled.
Results: IL-6 and IL-10 levels were significantly higher in newly diagnosed AML patients than in control group and their levels decreased when patients responded to induction chemotherapy (the blast cell count in their BM fall to >5%).
Conclusion: Our study demonstrated the decrease in the serum level of two markers (IL-6 and IL-10) in AML patients after induction chemotherapy, suggesting that assessment of their levels may be used as a prognostic markers and beneficial in the evaluation of the therapy making them highly applicable to routine clinical laboratories.