Changes of CD4+ CD25+ CD127low regulatory T cells in peripheral blood samples collected from the patients with cervical cancer and its clinical significance / 中华微生物学和免疫学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To investigate the changes of CD4+ CD25+ CD127low regulatory T cells (Treg) in peripheral blood samples collected from the patients with cervical cancer and its clinical signifi -cance , and to evaluate the correlations between Treg cells and the infection of high-risk human papillomavir-us ( HR-HPV) .Methods Flow cytometry analysis was performed to measure the percentages of CD4+ CD25+ CD127low Treg cells among CD4+T cells in peripheral blood samples collected from 249 patients with cervical cancer , 30 patients with cervix intraepithelial neoplasia ( CIN) and 60 healthy subjects .The corre-lations between the levels of Treg cells and the clinicopathological features of cervical cancer were analyzed . Flow-through hybridization and gene chip technology ( HybriMax) were used to analyze the genotypes of HPV strains isolated from the 339 subjects.The correlations between Treg cells and HR-HPV infection were ana-lyzed.Results Compared with the healthy subjects , the patients with cervical cancer or CIN showed higher percentages of CD4+ CD25+ CD127low Treg cells and rates of HR-HPV infection (P<0.01).The percentages of CD4+ CD25+ CD127low Treg cells in patients with cervical cancer were significantly correlated with the sta-ges of cervical cancer , which was staged by the Federation International of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) staging system,and the degrees of differentiation (P<0.05).The percentages of CD4+ CD25+ CD127low Treg cells in the peripheral blood of patients with positive HR-HPV were significantly higher than those in patients without HR-HPV infection (P<0.01).Conclusion The CD4+ CD25+ CD127low Treg cells in peripheral blood might play an important role in the oncogenesis and development of cervical carcinoma , thus it could be used as a potential marker for the evaluation of disease progression .Moreover , the CD4+ CD25+ CD127low Treg cells were closely related to the HR-HPV infection.