Altered plasma levels of cytokines, soluble adhesion molecules and matrix metalloproteases in venous thrombosis

Background/aimRecent studies have emphasized the importance of the inflammatory response mediated by monocyte and neutrophil activation in deep venous thrombosis (DVT); we therefore investigated whether this response was reflected in the plasma profile of inflammatory mediators in patients with suspected DVT.MethodsWe included a group of 169 consecutive patients admitted to hospital from the primary health care service with suspected lower limb DVT. Plasma levels of 43 mediators were examined for a cohort of 89 consecutive patients and 20 healthy controls by Luminex multiplex analyses, i.e. 13 interleukins, 3 immunomodulatory cytokines, 8 chemokines, 8 growth factors, 3 adhesion molecules and 8 matrix metalloproteases. Selected mediators were analyzed for a second cohort of 80 consecutive patients.ResultsThirty-five of 169 (21%) of referred patients were diagnosed with DVT. Only P-selectin (p < 0.0001), vascular cell adhesion protein 1 (VCAM-1, p = 0.0009), matrix metalloprotease 8 (MMP-8, p = 0.0151) and hepatocyte growth factor (HGF, p = 0.0415) differed significantly when comparing patients with and without DVT. When comparing DVT patients with healthy controls we observed significant differences for several mediators, where P-selectin (p = 0.0009), VCAM-1 (p < 0.0001), all the MMPs (all p < 0.0014) and HGF (p < 0.0001) showed the strongest significant differences. Unsupervised hierarchical clustering analyses based on biomarkers showing differences between patients with and without DVT could be used to identify patient subsets that differed significantly in DVT frequency.ConclusionPlasma biomarker profiling of selected soluble mediators can be used to identify subsets among patients with suspected lower limb thrombosis that differ significantly in their frequencies of DVT.