Infiltration of Immunoinflammatory Cells and Related Chemokine/Interleukin Expression in Different Gastric Immune Microenvironments

Abstract

Gastric mucosal immune microenvironment plays an important role in the occurrence and development of diseases such as inflammation and cancer. In the present study, single-sample gene set enrichment analysis (ssGSEA) was used to evaluate the expression of cytokines and the degree of immune cell infiltration in four different gastric mucosa tissues from normal gastric mucosa, simple gastritis, and atrophic gastritis to gastric cancer. Here, we show the immune microenvironments of these four gastric mucosae were significantly different. From inflammation to gastric cancer, most immunoinflammatory cells showed a downward trend such as central memory CD4 T cell. Instead, several cells showed an upward trend such as macrophage. Additionally, we found some chemokines/interleukins were illustrated to be low expressed (or highly expressed) in precancerous stage and highly expressed (or low expressed) in postcancerous stage, which demonstrated an opposite expression characteristic in pre-/postcancerous stage.