Influence of Thymosin ¦Á1 on serum levels of soluble Fas and TNFR1 in patients with severe chronic hepatitis B

    XUE Hongª²An, NIU Yingª²Hua, LIU Laª²Yang, YANG Qian

    1Department of Infectious Diseases, Second Hospital, Xi¡¯an Jiaotong University, Xi¡¯an 710004, China, 2Department of Infectious Diseases, First Hospital, Xi¡¯an Jiaotong University, Xi¡¯an 710061, China

    ¡¾Abstract¡¿ AIM: To study the influence of Thymosin ¦Á1 on the serum levels of sFas and sTNFR1 in treating patients with chronic severe hepatitis B. METHODS: Thirty patients diagnosed as chronic severe hepatitis B were assigned to receive either T¦Á1 for 3 weeks (16 patients) or to receive routine treatment without T¦Á1 (14 patients) as control. The serum levels of sFas and sTNFR1 were measured by ELISA in these two groups before the treatment and weekly during the period of treatment. RESULTS: The measurement of the serum levels of sTNFR1 showed that by the end of twoª²week treatment, the concentration of sTNFR1 decreased significantly compared with that of control and that before treatment (P<0.05), but no decrease of the serum levels of sTNFR1 was found in the control group. The serum level of sFas in T¦Á1 treatment group was significantly higher than that of control before treatment (P<0.05) and decreased significantly after one week¡¯s treatment (P<0.05), lower than that of control (P<0.05). CONCLUSION: T¦Á1 inhibits the apoptosis of hepatocytes mediated by TNFR1/TNF¦Áand Fas/FasL, thus reducing the mortality of patients with severe chronic hepatitis B. ......