Scientific Reports (Mar 2021)

Serum biomarkers confirming stable remission in inflammatory bowel disease

  • Christoph Kessel,
  • Miha Lavric,
  • Toni Weinhage,
  • Markus Brueckner,
  • Sytze de Roock,
  • Jan Däbritz,
  • Jakob Weber,
  • Sebastiaan J. Vastert,
  • Dirk Foell

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-86251-w
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 1
pp. 1 – 10

Abstract

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Abstract Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) have a chronic-remittent course. Optimal management of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) relies on early intervention, treat-to-target strategies and a tight disease control. However, it is challenging to assess the risk of relapses in individual patients. We investigated blood-based biomarkers for the confirmation of disease remission in patients with IBD. We retrospectively analyzed samples of 40 IBD patients (30 UC, 10 CD) enrolled in a tight-control follow-up study. Half of the patients had a flare during follow up. Serum was analyzed for S100A12 as well as S100A8/A9 and for 50 further biomarkers in a bead-based multiplex assay. The concentrations of 9 cytokines/chemokines and S100A8/A9 significantly differed in IBD patients with unstable remission (before flares) when compared to IBD patients with stable remission. Although the number of patients was small, ROC curve analyses revealed a number of biomarkers (IL-1β, IL-1RA, IL-8, IL13, IL-15, IL-21, IL-25, IFN-β, CXCL9, CXCL10, CXCL11, Galectin-1, G-CSF and S100A8/A9) that were elevated in patients with later occurring relapses. While earlier studies on peripheral biomarkers in IBD are limited to only few analytes, our study using a broad screening approach identified serum biomarkers with the potential to indicate unstable disease control in IBD, which may help to steer individual therapies to maintain remission.