Identifying Immune Drivers of Gulf War Illness Using a Novel Daily Sampling Approach
Abstract
Analyses were run on serum samples provided from 22 individuals who provided blood draws over 25 consecutive days. We examined 21 secreted serum cytokines and chemokines in this analysis. There are 8 individuals with GWI, 8 healthy veterans who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and 6 non-veteran men with fibromyalgia (FM). These simple analyses were run on the entire group. We hypothesized that the GWI group would demonstrate greater variability of analytes than the healthy controls. We indeed found that GWI participants showed greater fluctuations (as measured by the coefficient of variation) of Eotaxin-1 and IL-1beta than did the healthy group. Interestingly, the fibromyalgia group ALSO showed elevated variability in those exact same two analytes when contrasted against the healthy controls. There were no differences between the GWI and FM groups. Those results suggest that GWI and FM may involve a common immunological dysregulation. We also hypothesized that GWI individuals would have elevated levels of proinflammatory markers. We see what previous reports have shown. IL-1beta, in addition to having greater variability in GWI and FM, is also higher than in healthy controls. Again, we see that there are no differences between the GWI and FM groups. Based on the serum cytokines results so far, GWI and FM are indistinguishable from each other. Third, we hypothesized that proinflammatory markers would predict day-to-day changes in symptom severity. We found that IL-1beta, MMP3, MMP9, MCP1, MIP1B, IL12p40, IL18, and IL23 changes are associated with symptom changes in GWI (some are anti-correlated). The same list also predicted symptoms in fibromyalgia individuals, with the exception of MCP1 and IL23. The results of our preliminary analyses suggest that men with GWI look very similar to men with FM in terms of cytokine levels, day-to-day variability, and relationship between cytokines and symptom fluctuations. The two disorders may share the same pathophysiological
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2014
- Accession Number
- ADA613305
Entities
People
- Jarred Younger
Organizations
- Stanford University