Endometriosis And Immunity: The Role Of Complement Proteins And Investigation Of Complement System Activation In Endometriosis
Project no. 12 · Status: Kapanmış · 2016
Summary
Endometriosis is a gynecological disease, affecting women in the reproductive ages. The etiology and pathology of the disease have not been completely elucidated. Current studies to understand the basis of the disease support the theories associated with the involvement of immune response proteins. In previous studies, it was shown that complement system proteins have a dramatic change in their gene expression profiles during the course of the disease. Therefore, complement system proteins can be good biomarkers for diagnostic and/or prognostic purposes. In this study, we evaluated candidate complement system proteins as potential clinical biomarkers of endometriosis based on their serum level changes. In this thesis, blood samples from 71 endometriosis cases with the decision of operation due to medical reasons and from 79 women without endometriosis within the matching age range were taken. Serum levels of complement system proteins, C3, C5 and C6 were measured in the samples taken from the patient group before and after the operations. Serum levels of C3, C5 and C6 in the control group who were not diagnosed with endometriosis, were compared with the patient group. Results showed that the change observed for C5 complement protein at the tissue mRNA level in the previous study of our working group was not reflected in serum protein levels. Similar results were obtained for C3 protein, which functions as an upstream factor of C5 in the complement pathway. In spite of that, discovery of a significant difference between C6 levels measured in postoperative samples of endometriosis patients and women without endometriosis is a new finding revealed with the current thesis.