Pathologic Observation Of Intestinal Mucosal Lesions And The Association Of Lesions With Cytokines In The Patients With Blastocystis Hominis Infection

Objective : To determine whether Blastocystis hominis (B. hominis) infection was able to lead to intestinal mucosal lesions and explore the association of the lesions with the cytokines interleukin(IL)-8, interleukin(IL)-18, granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF), and the quantity of B. hominis during the infective stage. Methods: Fresh stools of the patients suffered from diarrhea were examined with direct wet-mount, iodine staining and trichrome staining. Perform colonoscopy on the 50 patients who were positive for B. hominis infection but negative for other parasites and 30 healthy people as the controls,and their abnormal or normal intestinal mucosa was made tissue homogenate. If some pathologic changes had been found by colonoscopy, the pathologic examinations of mucosal biopsy specimen would be done. The correlation between the extent of the lesious and the quantity of B. hominis was analyzed by Spearman analysis. Intestinal tissue homogenate from the patients and the controls was detected for the levels of IL-8, IL-18 and GM-CSF by ELISA. Results:Among three methods of detecting B. hominis, trichrome staining and iodine staining were better than direct wet-mount. 60% of all the patients infected with B. hominis revealed intestinal mucosal inflammation at different degrees by colonoscopy. The lesions mostly located at the left of the colon, accounting for 56.67%. 29 pathologic examinations demonstrated chronic mucosal inflammation,and 1 revealed colonic ulcer. The extent of the lesious was positive correlated with the quantity of B. hominis (rs =0.678, P<0.01). The levels of the cytokines IL-8, IL-18 and GM-CSF of patients were significantly higher than those of healthy group (P<0.05 or P<0.01), moreover, the levels of cytokines IL-8, IL-18 and...