Cytokine and Antibody Based Diagnostic Algorithms for Sputum Culture-Positive Pulmonary Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the most serious infectious diseases globally and has high mortality rates. A variety of diagnostic tests are available, yet none are wholly reliable. Serum cytokines, although significantly and frequently induced by different diseases and thus good biomarkers for disease diagnosis and prognosis, are not sufficiently disease-specific. TB-specific antibody detection, on the other hand, has been reported to be highly specific but not sufficiently sensitive. In this study, our aim was to improve the sensitivity and specificity of TB diagnosis by combining detection of TB-related cytokines and TB-specific antibodies in peripheral blood samples.

TB-related serum cytokines were screened using a human cytokine array. TB-related cytokines and TB-specific antibodies were detected in parallel with microarray technology. The diagnostic performance of the new protocol for active TB was systematically compared with other traditional methods.

Here, we show that cytokines I-309, IL-8 and MIG are capable of distinguishing patients with active TB from healthy controls, patients with latent TB infection, and those with a range of other pulmonary diseases, and that these cytokines, and their presence alongside antibodies for TB-specific antigens Ag14-16kDa, Ag32kDa, Ag38kDa and Ag85B, are specific markers for active TB. The diagnostic protocol for active TB developed here, which combines the detection of three TB-related cytokines and TB-specific antibodies, is highly sensitive (91.03%), specific (90.77%) and accurate (90.87%).

Our results show that combining detection of TB-related cytokines and TB-specific antibodies significantly enhances diagnostic accuracy for active TB, providing greater accuracy than conventional diagnostic methods such as interferon gamma release assays (IGRAs), TB antibody Colloidal Gold Assays and microbiological culture, and suggest that this diagnostic protocol has potential for clinical application.