| Chronic HBV infection is one of the major health concerns around the world. The understanding on the mechanism of chronic HBV infection is the foundation for developing a novel effective treatment. The research results indicate that the suppression of specific immune function is a key factor for HBV chronic infection. However, the machanism of this suppressive immune response still remains unclear. The maintainance of immunotolerance is considered to depend on central tolerance and peripherial tolerance, and the regulatory T cell (Treg) has great role in maintaining immune tolerance and stablizing immune response. Treg cell is related to the low specific immune-response in chronic HBV infection patients.FOXP3(the forkhead/winged-helix transcriptional regulators P3) is expressed specifically in regulatory T cells, and exerts great influence on the development and function of Treg cells. Currently, however, very little is known about the mechanism of FOXP3 regulates the development and function of Treg cells. The elucidation on the problems is very important for developing new treatments targetd on Treg for autoimmune diseases, tumors, and chornic infectious diseases including chornic hepatitis B. In this study, the objective is to examine the relationship between FOXP3 mRNA level in peripheral blood mononuclear cell(PBMC) and hepatitis B infection.Methods: Real-time fluorescence relative quantitative RT-PCR was used to quantify FOXP3 mRNA levels in peripheral blood mononuclear cells from 11 HBV-uninfected subjects and 25 patients with chronic hepatitis B disease.Results and Conclusions: FOXP3 mRNA levels in hepatitis B patients were higher than that in HBV-uninfected subjects (8.41±0.13vs9.82±0.20,P<0.01) and were correlated with HBV viral loads directly(r=0.70,P<0.01),but were not correlated with ALT(r=0.06,P>0.05). High expression of FOXP3 might be a important factor for persistence of HBV infection.
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