Systemic inflammation is associated with differential gene expression and airway neutrophilia in asthma

Systemic inflammation is reported to be associated with neutrophilic airway inflammation in asthma, this study aimed to examine the molecular mechanisms of the neutrophilia that is associated with systemic inflammation, and hypothesized that asthma patients with systemic inflammation have a group of genes that are differentially expressed and are assciated with airway inflammation. 50 asthma patients were recruited and grouped as asthmatics with systemic inflammation (n=18) and asthamtics without systemic inflammation (n=16) accroding to the levels of serum CRP and IL-6. RNA was extracted from induced sputum and was reverse-transcribed into cDNA. Gene profiling was performed using Illumina Sentrix HumanRef-8 Version 2 Expression BeadChips, and genes that were differentially expressed between asthmatics with systemic inflammation and asthmatics without systemic inflammation were compared and valided using qPCR.