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Updated: Oct 4, 2025
A Mouse Model of Orthopedic Surgery to Study Postoperative Cognitive Dysfunction and Tissue Regeneration
Published on: February 27, 2018
Interleukin 8 in postoperative delirium - Preliminary findings from two studies
Florian Lammers-Lietz1, Levent Akyuz2, Insa Feinkohl3
1Department of Anaesthesiology and Operative Intensive Care Medicine (CCM, CVK), Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Corporate Member of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, And Berlin Institute of Health, Berlin, Germany.
Objective:
Studies have suggested that inflammation contributes to the pathogenesis of postoperative delirium, but previous results on the proinflammatory cytokine IL-8 in plasma are contradictory. Additionally, a significant fraction of IL-8 is bound to erythrocytes, but the relevance of whole blood IL-8 in delirium has not been studied. In this work, we analyzed the association of postoperative delirium with levels of unbound IL-8 in plasma and levels of IL-8 in whole blood in patients from two studies which were conducted in our department and have not been presented previously. We assessed the prognostic value of whole blood IL-8.
Methods:
Plasma/whole blood IL-8 was measured at least once in N = 504 patients preoperatively, on day one (d1) and/or three months after surgery in the BioCog observational study. Whole blood IL-8 was measured in N = 64 patients from the PHYDELIO trial preoperatively, on d1 and d7 after surgery. For the determination of whole blood IL-8, EDTA-preserved blood samples underwent lysis by adding Triton-X100 surfactant. Plasma and whole blood IL-8 levels were assessed with two different immunoassay kits. Delirium was appraised systematically for seven postoperative days according to DSM criteria using two comparable protocols consisting of validated screening tools.
Results:
Delirium occurred in 25% of BioCog and 14% of PHYDELIO patients. In BioCog, IL-8 was elevated on d1 and in delirious patients. A steeper postoperative increase in delirium was confounded by surgery-related factors. A crescendo-decrescendo pattern of whole blood IL-8 levels was observed in non-delirious patients with a peak on d1. This pattern was more distinct in delirious BioCog patients, but inverted in delirious PHYDELIO patients. Preoperative whole blood IL-8>318.4 pg/mL (reference <150 pg/mL) had adequate sensitivity (0.79/0.78) and specificity (0.53/0.67) for delirium in both samples.
Conclusion:
Our results contribute to an inflammatory hypothesis of postoperative delirium.
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