Humoral and cellular immunity in familial mediterranean fever

SUMMARY Familial mediterranean fever (FMF) is a chronically disease which is inherited as an autosomal recessive trait and is characterized with paroxysmal serosal inflammatory attacks. Etiopathogenesis and etiology of this disease is still obscure. The disease is commonly seen in our country comparing with other except Israel, Arabic Countries and Armenians. In our study we investigated how the cellular and humoral immunity is affected in patients with FMF by detecting serum immunoglobulin (Ig) levels and total T lymphocytes, total B lymphocytes and subgroups of T lymphocytes. Serum Ig levels are measured by nephelometric method and total T lymphocytes, total B lymphocytes, T suppressor lymphocytes, helper T lymphocytes, natural killer lymphocytes, Th/Ts ratio are detected by flowcytometric method in 37 patients (25 male, 12 female) aged between 3.5-47 years with the median age 15±1.5. The disease is seen twice more in male than female (male/female 2:1). Beside abdominal pain, fever, arthralgia; chest pain was a prominent clinical finding in adult patients. It has been observed that emotional factors were also important to initiated the attacks. In this study no change in Ig levels has been detected in both attack and attack free period. Ig levels did not show a significant difference either in patients using colchicine or in patients taking no medicine but slight increase in IgG levels in colchicine group. The number of total B lymphocytes, total T lymphocytes, suppressor T lymphocytes, helper T lymphocytes, natural killer lymphocytes and Th/Ts ratio were all normal in all patients including attack and attack free period, colchicine and colchicine free periods. In etiopathogenesis of FMF, it has been suggested that immunological system may play an important role. Various findings were reported related to serum Ig levels and T lymphocytes subsets in patient with FMF but our study showed that no significant changes occur on these parameters. 83