Serum levels of soluble programmed death-1 and soluble programmed death-ligand 1 in chronic hepatitis B patients with clinical cure and their clinical features / 临床肝胆病杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To investigate the serum levels of soluble programmed death-1 (sPD-1) and soluble programmed death-ligand 1 (sPD-L1) in chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients with clinical cure, the correlation between programmed death-1 (PD-1) and lymphocytes by flow cytometry, and the recovery of hepatitis B virus (HBV)-specific immunity. Methods A total of 26 CHB patients with clinical cure, 26 treatment-naïve CHB patients, and 26 healthy controls who were diagnosed at the outpatient service of Peking University First Hospital from January to May of 2022 were enrolled, and related clinical data and peripheral blood samples were collected. ELISA was used to measure the serum levels of sPD-1 and sPD-L1, and flow cytometry was used to measure the expression of PD-1 in peripheral blood lymphocytes. CHB patients with clinical cure were compared with the treatment-naïve CHB patients and the healthy controls. The Kruskal-Wallis H test was used for comparison of non-normally distributed continuous data between three groups, and the chi-square test was used for comparison of categorical data between groups. The Pearson correlation analysis or the Spearman correlation analysis was used to investigate the correlation between two continuous variables. Results For the 26 CHB patients with clinical cure, the mean time of antiviral therapy was 8.33 years, with entecavir as the antiviral drug. The CHB patients with clinical cure had significantly higher levels of sPD-1 and sPD-L1 than the healthy controls ( P 0.05). Conclusion The serum levels of sPD-1 and sPD-L1 in treatment-naïve CHB patients are mainly associated with exhausted CD8 + T cells in peripheral blood, while there is no significant correlation between serum sPD-1/sPD-L1 and exhausted CD8 + T cells in peripheral blood in CHB patients with clinical cure.