MAIT cells predict long-term prognosis in liver failure patients

Liver failure (LF) is a life-threatening clinical syndrome characterized by intense systemic inflammation and organ failure(s), leading to a high mortality rate. The pathogenesis of LF is multifactorial, immune response, and gut bacterial translocation are thought to be major contributing factors. Mucosal-associated invariant T (MAIT) cells play a critical role in immune response and gut bacterial translocation. We aimed to investigate changes of the MAIT cell ratio in patients with LF and to explore the predictive value for long-term prognosis in patients with LF. MATERIAL AND METHOD: We recruited 75 patients with LF from Nantong Third People’s Hospital, isolated peripheral blood mononuclear cells, and detected the proportion of circulating MAIT cells by flow cytometry. Statistical analyses were performed using the GraphPad Prism software. RESULTS: Our data showed that the proportion of MAIT cells alterations was independent of the cause of viral infection in patients with LF. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis showed that LF patients with low level of MAIT cells had poor long-term prognosis. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of the MAIT cell proportion was larger than that of the Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD) score. More importantly, the combination of MAIT cell proportion and MELD score had a better effect in predicting long-term prognosis of LF patients than any single index (AUC = 0.91, 95% CI:0.84–0.97), and multivariate logistic regression analysis indicated that the circulating MAIT cell proportion was an independent risk factor for LF. CONCLUSION: The proportion of MAIT cells in PBMC is an outstanding predictor for the long-term prognosis in patients with LF.