Taenia crassicepsInfection Does Not Influence the Development of Experimental Rheumatoid Arthritis

Abstract

It was previously reported by our group that infection withTaenia crassicepsreduces incidence and severity of inflammatory and autoimmune experimental diseases like type 1 diabetes and experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis. In this research, we set out to study whether infection withT. crassicepswould affect the development of experimental rheumatoid arthritis (RA). We found that mice infected with the parasite and induced with experimental RA showed similar clinical scores as the noninfected experimental RA group; systemic cytokines were not affected while anti-CII Abs were higher in the infected group. Histological evaluation showed damage in both infected and noninfected experimental RA-induced groups and although some surface molecules such as PDL-2 and MR which are associated with immunomodulatory mechanisms were upregulated in the infected and RA-induced group as compared to the noninfected RA group, they did not exert any changes in the outcome of experimental RA. Thus, we determined that infection withT. crassicepsdoes not influence the outcome of experimental RA.