Evaluation of IL-17 Gene Expression in the Peripheral Blood of Patients with Common Variable Immunodeficiency

Producing IL-17, Th17 cells induce BAFF and APRIL, two important mediators for B-cell survival and activation. Common variable immunodeficiency (CVID) is a group of many primary immunodeficiency diseases with a common set of features (including hypo-gammaglobulinemia) and different underlying causes. The prevalence of CVID is 1 to 50,000. Hence, the aim of this study was to measure IL-17 gene expression in peripheral blood of patients with CVID.

Total mRNA extracted from whole blood samples of 10 patients with CVID and 10 normal controls; then, IL-17 gene was measured using qRT-PCR.

There was a slight decrease in transcript levels of IL-17 in patients with CVID, even though, it was not statistically significant (P = 0.195).

We showed that IL-17 is decreased in patients with CVID and this could be an explanation for their humoral immunity response insufficiencies. Absence of statistical significance in this IL-17 reduction may be due to our sample size and increasing the number of samples may result in statistical significance of this in future studies.