Degos and cytokines

Dear colleagues,
as we all know there are three theories considering the pathogenesis of Degos disease: coagulopathy, vasculitis and primary defect of the endothelial cells.
Our clinic decided to examine the possibility of vasculitis as a cause. Since the signs of vasculitis are not always clearly obvious in the histological samples of Degos patients, we decided to look for inflammatory markers, namely cytokines. We performed an overview of the whole bibliography about which cytokines are involved in the various vasculitides of the Chapel-Hill classification and we chose eight of them the are common in the majority of the vvasculitis forms. We are going to measure them here in Dessau in the serum with ELISA method and then we are going to detect them on the tissue samples. The latter has the problem that the direct or indirect immunofluorescence that we are going to use cannot quantify the cytokines. In order to do that, special equipment is needed and I would be happy to know if somebody has a better idea (I have read in some publications that some researchers have quantified the immunofluorescence with Adobe Photoshop). In addition to that right now we are repeating the statistical analysis that we did last year and the preliminary results are more or less the same like the last ones.
I will keep in touch and in case I have something new I will report it immediately. I wish you all the very best.
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Athanasios Theodoridis, MD
Departments of Dermatology and Immunology
Dessau Medical Center
Auenweg 38
06847 Dessau / Germany