The serum Fas and Fas Ligand levels in childhood acute leukemias

Aim: Apoptosis play role in tissue developing stages, homeostatic mechanism that determine the cell count in the tissue, immune events, tissue damage caused by illness and harmful agents and cell aging process. Abnormalities and alterations in apoptosis mechanism may lead to cancer development. Cysteine proteases enzymes, called caspases, appear to be involved in both the initial signaling events. There are many proteins that trigger intrinsic and extrinsic pathway and induce apoptosis signals. Fas and its specific ligand that known as Fas Ligand are the best defined dead receptors and have functions in apoptosis regulation with many tumor types. Fas binds the ligand on the cytotoxic T cells and start apoptosis. Objectives of this study were to determine serum levels of Fas and Fas Ligand at the time of diagnosis in childhood acute leukemias that play important role in apoptosis mechanism. Patients and Methods: In this study, we investigated serum Fas and Fas Ligand levels by using ELISA method in childhood acute leukemias. Twenty-nine cases with Acute lymphoblastic leukemia and twenty-three cases with Acute myeloblastic leukemia at the ages of 1-18 years are included this study. The age distrubition of the control group varied 1-15 years consisted of twenty-seven children. We investigated serum Fas and Fas Ligand levels at the time of diagnosis from peripheral blood samples.Results: The comparison of the average values of the Fas levels in acute leukemia patients and control group have shown important difference as statistically (p<0,05). The comparison of the average values of the Fas levels in ALL and AML patients have shown no difference as statistically (p>0,05). The comparison of the Fas levels in ALL patients according to immunphenotypes; T-ALL and B-ALL have shown important difference as statistically (p<0,05).