Study of Regulatory T-cell Percentages in Peripheral Blood of Patients with Chronic Urticaria

Abstract

The term chronic urticaria (CU) is understood as the appearance of recurrent and transitory (<24 hours) pruritic erythematous wheals that present at least twice weekly for at least 6 weeks. It is chronic, insidious, and considerably affects the Quality of life of patients who experience it .It is one of the most frequent presenting complaints in dermatology, allergy, and emergency departments (Jáuregui et al., 2014). In 80–90% of patients with chronic urticaria (CU), no specific underlying cause is found, although there is a subset of these patients in whom autoantibodies to the highaffinity immunoglobulin E receptor FceRI are found . This subgroup is labelled chronic autoimmune urticaria (CAU) . It seems to be one of the most difficult to treat variants of CU (Sun et al.,2011). Examination of skin biopsies from urticaria patients demonstrated that most of the infiltrating T cells possessed a CD4+ helper phenotype. These observations support the notion that T lymphocytes and particularly CD4+ T cells are involved in the pathogenesis of CU (Sun et al.,2011).