Concentration Levels of IL -10 and TNF-α Cytokines in Patients with HPV DNA Positive and Negative Cervical Lesions

Objective: The present study was performed to assess the immune response in women with HPV DNA positive and negative cervical lesions.

Methods and Patients: Eighty women with cervical lesions were cytologically classified into 4 groups: ASC-US (20), CINI (30), CINII-III (16), and cervical carcinoma (14) prior to HPV DNA detection. Estimation of IL-10 and TNF-α cytokines was performed via Enzyme linked immunosorrbent assay (ELISA) technique in cervical secretions and serum and PCR screening kits were utilized to detect HPV DNA on cervical smears.

Results: The detected levels of IL-10 (mean ± SE) concentration in cervical secretions of patients with HPV DNA positive and negative states and control group were 88.73 ± 16.90 pg/ml, 24.00 ± 2.84 pg/ml and 8.27 ± 0.59 pg/ml respectively with significant differences (p<0.05), while levels of TNF-α in cervical secretion of the studied groups were 12.18 ± 3.49 pg/ml, 9.90 ± 0.73 pg/ml, and 7.90 ± 0.87 pg/ml respectively with non significant differences. The detected levels of IL-10 in cervical secretions of HPV DNA positive cases (88.73 ± 16.90 pg/ml) were significantly higher than in the sera (13.69 ± 2.41 pg/ml) (p<0.05), while the levels of TNF-α in their cervical secretions (12.18 ± 3.49 pg/ml) was slightly raised than in their sera (11.5 9 ± 3.14 pg/ml) with non significance differences.

Conclusions: The observed higher levels of IL-10 than TNF-α indicate down-modulation of tumor-specific immune response to HPV infected lesions via significant raised concentrations of the first cytokine than the second one. Therefore, this phenomenon seems to provide a tumor progressive microenvironment by the immunosuppressant properties of IL-10 with minimal antitumor activity of TNF-α.