Evaluation of the inflammatory predictive efficiency of progranulin as compared with common pro-inflammatory regulators

Progranulin (PGRN), is a multifunctional protein with profound expression in epithelial and immune cells in which plays a crucial role in controlling host-defense signaling pathways during infection and inflammation. The current study was carried out to evaluate the efficiency of PGRN as a predictive inflammatory marker for a group of diseases with different etiologies that cause acute and chronic inflammations. A total of 120 participants with various diseases including rheumatoid arthritis (RA), Helicobacter pylori infection, burn wound, hepatitis B, and prostate cancer, and 20 healthy people were enrolled in this study. The levels of serum PGRN and interleukin-6 (IL-6) were detected. Elevated serum PGRN levels have been reported in all patient groups when compared with those in healthy controls (P > 0.05). Likewise, increased serum hsCRP and IL-6 levels were seen in all patient groups. However, for some patient groups, the differences in hsCRP and IL-6 levels did not reach statistical significance (P > 0.05) in comparison with control group. Furthermore, serum PGRN levels exhibited positive correlation with hsCRP in H. pylori and RA patient groups. As well as, with IL-6 only in RA patient group, whereas no significant correlations were found with the rest of studied diseases. This study concluded that PGRN is an effective nonspecific inflammatory indicator of acute and chronic inflammations. It had also a higher predictive efficiency than hsCRP and IL-6 which are commonly used as inflammatory predictive markers.