Investigation of Serum Visfatin Levels in Patients with Psoriasis

Background and Design: Psoriasis is a chronic, recurrent, T-cell mediated inflammatory skin disease with multifactorial etiology. It was shown that visfatin, an adipocytokine, induces expression of the tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha), interleukin (IL)-1 beta, IL-6 ve IL-8 in previous studies. in the present study, we aimed to investigate serum visfatin levels and relation between visfatin and psoriasis severity. Material and Method: Forty psoriatic patient and 40 healthy controls were included in this study. Serum visfatin, IL-6, TNF-alpha and CRP levels were measured in all participant and PASI scores of the psoriatic patients were estimated. Results: The mean serum visfatin and IL-6 levels were not statistically different in psoriatic patients compared with controls (p=0.509 and p=0.213). Serum TNF-alpha levels were significantly higher in patients with psoriasis than in healthy controls (p=0.015). There was no statistically significant difference in CRP levels between two groups (p=0.370). However, there was positive correlation between PASI scores and serum visfatin or CRP levels respectively (p=0.001, p=0.002). The positive correlation was also found between serum visfatin and CRP levels (p=0.029). Conclusion: These results demonstrated that visfatin may not play a significant role in the immunopathogenesis of psoriasis but visfatin could be accepted as a nonspecific inflammatory marker to correlated severity of the disease. (Turkderm 2010; 44: 15-8)