Abstract: Objective: To investigate the role of interleukin-10 (IL-10) and IL-12 in the differential diagnosis of tuberculous and malignant pleural effusion through measuring the serum and pleural effusion IL-10 and IL-12 levels of tuberculous and malignant pleural effusion patients.Methods: Forty-eight inpatients with exudative pleural effusion who didn't receive any treatment before were selected. According to the pathogeny, the patients were divided into tuberculous pleural effusion group (n=25) and malignant pleural effusion group (n=23). The levels of IL-10 and IL-12 in peripheral blood and pleural effusion of the patients in two groups were detected by Cytometric Bead Array (CBA). The differences in IL-10, IL-12 levels and IL-12/IL-10 ratio were compared between two groups. The ROC curves of the above indexes, cast-off and adenosine deaminase (ADA) were used to compare the effects in differential diagnosis of tuberculous and malignant pleural effusion.Results: There were no statistical differences in the levels of serum IL-10, IL-12 and IL-12/IL-10 ratios of the patients between tuberculous and malignant pleural effusion groups (P>0.05),and the IL-12 level in pleural effusion and the IL-12/IL-10 ratio of the patients in malignant pleural effusion group were lower than those in tuberculous pleural effusion group (P<0.005).The area under the ROC curve for the levels of IL-12 in pleural effusion (0.984) was higher than those for the ratio of IL-12/IL-10, cast-off and ADA (0.744, 0.804 and 0.911, respectively) in the differential diagnosis of tuberculous and malignant pleural effusion.Conclusion: The detection of IL-12 levels in pleural effusion is helpful for the differential diagnosis of tuberculous and malignant pleural effusion, and the pleural effusion is easy to obtain, therefore the detection of IL-12 in pleural effusion is worth to be widely applied in clinic.

Key words: interleukin-10, interleukin-12, tuberculous pleural effusion, malignant pleural effusion