Potential Role of Soluble TNF-α Receptors in Diagnosis of Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease.

Objective: Soluble tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α) receptors contain two subclasses: soluble tumor necrosis factor receptor (sTNFR)1 and sTNFR 2. The aim of our study was to investigate whether serum levels of them are biomarkers for diagnosis of chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients.

Methods: The serum samples were collected from 51 patients with CKD and 30 healthy controls. The presence of circulating sTNFR1 and 2 was quantified by ELISA and Cystain C (CysC), urea, creatinine (CREA), uric acid (UA), total protein (TP), Albumin (ALB), and 24 hours urinary protein (PRO) were examined by automatic biochemical analyzer.

Results: Levels of circulating sTNFR1 and sTNFR2 were significantly higher in CKD group than control (P<0.05). There was significant correlation between sTNFR1 and sTNFR2 (P<0.01). Both sTNFR1and sTNFR2 were positively related to serum urea, CREA, and CysC (P<0.01). Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis showed that the area under the curve (AUC) of sTNFR1 and sTNFR2 were 0.987 and 0.986, respectively.

Conclusions: This is the first study to show that combined detection of sTNFR1and sTNFR2 could be usable for CKD diagnosis.