IL-6/IL-10 and IL-1β/IL-4 ratios associated with poor ovarian response in women undergoing in-vitro fertilization

The aim of this work was to evaluate whether serum cytokines levels are associated with ovarian response in IVF. 149 patients were included in a retrospective study. Cytokines IL-2, IL-4, IL- 6, IL-8, IL-10, VEGF, IFNγ, TNFα, IL-1α, IL-1β, MCP-1 and EGF were measured by sandwich immunoassay previously to ovarian stimulation. Performing hierarchical cluster analysis, we observed that the antral follicle count, the total oocytes recovered and the MII recovered are grouped in the same cluster as the cytokines IL-2-4-6-10-1α-1β, IFNγ y TNFα. Then, we found that the ratio between IL and 6 and IL-10 was higher in low responder women (2.15 versus 1.55; p = 0.035). If we establish 0.9 as a cut-off for the IL-6/IL-10, we observed that above this value the risk of having a low response to ovarian stimulation was more than 3 times greater than below this value (22.9 % versus 6.0 %; p = 0.007). Also, the ratio IL-1β/IL-4 was higher in patients with normal or suboptimal response (0.62 versus 0.34; p = 0.034) and any patient with low response had a value greater than 0.7 (p = 0.003). As a conclusion, the IL-6/IL-10 and IL-1β/IL-4 ratios showed differences between normoresponder women and patients with low ovarian response.