Circulating interleukin-18 (IL-18) is a predictor of response to gemcitabine based chemotherapy in patients with pancreatic adenocarcinoma

Background: This study was conducted to investigate the serum levels of interleukin-18 (IL-18) in patients with pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PA) and the relationship with tumor progression and known prognostic parameters. Methods: Thirty-three patients with PA were studied. Serum samples were obtained on first admission before any treatment. Serum IL-18 levels were analyzed using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Age-and sex-matched 30 healthy controls were included in the analysis. Results: The median age at diagnosis was 59 years, range 32-84 years; 20 (61%) patients were men and the remaining were women. The median follow-up time was 26.0 weeks (range: 1.0-184.0 weeks). The median overall survival of the whole group was 41.3 +/- 8.3 weeks [95% confidence interval (CI) = 25-58 weeks]. The baseline serum IL-18 levels were significantly higher in patients with PA than in the control group (p < 0.001). Serum IL-18 levels were significantly higher in the patients with high erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) (p = 0.01 and p = 0.05). Moreover, the chemotherapy-(CTx) unresponsive patients had higher serum IL-18 levels compared to CTx-responsive (p = 0.04) subjects. Conversely, serum IL-18 concentration was found to have no prognostic role on survival (p = 0.45). Conclusion: Serum levels of IL-18 can be a good diagnostic and predictive marker; especially for predicting the response to gemcitabine based CTx in patients with PA but it has no prognostic role. (C) 2016 Japanese Society of Chemotherapy and The Japanese Association for Infectious Diseases. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.