1Nahed Baddour, 2Mohamed
Tamer Afifi.
Departments
of 1Pathology and 2Internal medicine, Faculty of
Medicine, Alexandria University.
To highlight the
differences in the patterns of interleukin-10 (IL-10) and interferon gamma
(IFN-g) cytokine expression between ulcerative
colitis (UC) and Crohn's disease (CD), 45 endoscopic colonic biopsies were
studied. They included biopsies from 10 cases of UC, 5 biopsies from active
sites of CD, 5 from inactive sites of CD, 15 cases of noninflammatory bowel
disease (NIBD) and 10 controls. All biopsies were subjected to
immunohistochemical staining using monoclonal anti-IL-10 antibody and
polyclonal anti-IFN g antibody. Quantitative analysis of positive signals were performed
using a point counting technique. IL-10 was
expressed in the intestinal epithelial cells, and in the mononuclears of the
lamina propria. Higher levels of expression were detected in UC (1.44±1.28)
than active and inactive CD lesions and NIBD and controls 0.67±0.66, 0.59±0.67,
0.69±0.84, 0.67±0.48 repectively (p<0.05). Expression of IFN-g was significantly
higher in both active and
inactive sites of CD (2.19±0.87, 0.66±0.99 respectively) than UC, NIBD and
controls (0.24±0.54, 0.60±0.84, and 0.62±1.07 respectively)(p=< 0.05). It is concluded that there is a
predominantly Th1 type response in cases of CD and Th2
type response in UC.