Immune status changing helps diagnose osteoarticular tuberculosis

PLoS One. 2021 Jun 15;16(6):e0252875. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0252875. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Objective: This study is aimed to develop a new nomogram for the clinical diagnosis of osteoarticular tuberculosis (TB).

Methods: xCell score estimation to obtained the immune cell type abundance scores. We downloaded the expression profile of GSE83456 from GEO and proceed xCell score estimation. The routine blood examinations of 326 patients were collected for further validation. We analyzed univariate and multivariate logistic regression to identified independent predicted factor for developing the nomogram. The performance of the nomogram was assessed using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. The correlation of ESR with lymphocytes, monocytes, and ML ratio was performed and visualized in osteoarticular TB patients.

Results: Compared with the healthy control group in the dataset GSE83456, the xCell score of basophils, monocytes, neutrophils, and platelets was higher, while lymphoid was lower in the EPTB group. The clinical data showed that the cell count of monocytes were much higher, while the cell counts of lymphocytes were lower in the osteoarticular TB group. AUCs of the nomogram was 0.798 for the dataset GSE83456, and 0.737 for the clinical data. We identified the ML ratio, BMI, and ESR as the independent predictive factors for osteoarticular TB diagnosis and constructed a nomogram for the clinical diagnosis of osteoarticular TB. AUCs of this nomogram was 0.843.

Conclusions: We demonstrated a significant change between the ML ratio of the EPTB and non-TB patients. Moreover, we constructed a nomogram for the clinical diagnosis of the osteoarticular TB diagnosis, which works satisfactorily.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Case-Control Studies
  • Child
  • Child, Preschool
  • Databases, Genetic
  • Female
  • Gene Expression Profiling / methods*
  • Gene Expression Regulation
  • Gene Regulatory Networks*
  • Humans
  • Leukocyte Count
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Monocytes / metabolism*
  • Nomograms*
  • Retrospective Studies
  • Tuberculosis, Osteoarticular / blood
  • Tuberculosis, Osteoarticular / diagnosis*
  • Tuberculosis, Osteoarticular / immunology
  • Young Adult

Grants and funding

This work was sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81560359); National Natural Science Foundation of China (81860393). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.