<b>Results:</b> Enrolled cases were divided to 26 patients with active uveitis, 25 patients with recovered uveitis and 24 patients without uveitis and interestingly, just IL-2 was the only cytokine that showed statistical difference in patients with BD uveitis in comparison with other groups (<i>p</i><sub>value</sub> = 0.02).
The evaluation of the IL-2 gene polymorphism (p=0.0065) and IL-10 gene polymorphism (p=0.0483) distributions with respect to age of BD onset revealed a statistically significant distribution.
The JAK1/STAT3 signaling pathway is activated in BD, possibly through the activation of Th1/Th17-type cytokines such as IL-2, interferon (IFN-γ), IL-6, IL-17 and IL-23.
These results reveal that IL-2 -330 GT genotype may be a susceptibility factor for BD, whereas IL-2 -330 TT genotype seems to display a protective association with BD.
No apparent differences in interleukin (IL)-4, 6, 8 and 10 were observed, whereas production of soluble IL-2-receptor and tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha were more pronounced in the BD group.
In this study, long-term T cell lines from peripheral blood of BD patients (n=6) and controls (n=7) were stimulated with mycobacterial recombinant HSP and purified protein derivate (PPD) and expanded with IL-2.