Are Plasma IL-10 Levels a Useful Marker of Human Clinical Tolerance in Peanut Allergy?

BACKGROUND: Food allergies are a major component of the burden of allergic disease. Accurate risk assessment for prediction of future clinical reactivity or clinical tolerance is limited by currently available techniques. Recent studies suggest that constitutively elevated global serum levels of IL-10, a cytokine that down-regulates both Th1 and Th2 cytokine production, may be useful in identifying human clinical tolerance to foods. OBJECTIVE: Determine the usefulness of constitutive IL-10 levels as a marker of clinical tolerance to peanut in children and adults. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: 107 subjects who were clinically tolerant to peanut and 94 subjects who were clinically allergic to peanut participated. Plasma was analyzed via ELISA to quantify the frequency of individuals with constitutive IL-10 levels and the intensity of those responses. The data were then stratified by age, gender and clinical status to assess the utility of this putative biomarker in specific at-risk groups. All 201 subjects had readily quantified plasma IL-10. Levels were no higher in subjects who were clinically tolerant to peanut than those in individuals clinically allergic to peanut. Stratification by age, gender or both did not improve the capacity of IL-10 levels to identify clinical tolerance to peanut. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Plasma IL-10 levels are neither a useful biomarker of clinical tolerance to peanut nor a potential tool for identification of clinical tolerance to peanut in humans.