Fig. 2
From: In vivo pre-activation of monocytes in patients with axial spondyloarthritis
Elevated spontaneous and muramyl dipeptide (MDP)-induced proinflammatory cytokine production by monocytes from patients with axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA). Cytokine production by monocytes after stimulation of whole blood without (unstimulated) or with MDP, lipopolysaccharide (LPS), fibroblast-stimulating lipopeptid-1 (FSL), and PAM3CSK4 (PAM) for 5 h with brefeldin A added for the last 3 h. Cytokine production was analysed after intracellular staining by fluorescence-activated cell sorting. Monocytes were identified according to CD68 expression. a A representative example of cytokine production of CD68+ monocytes of a patient with axSpA in whole blood without stimulation and stimulation with the respective stimuli is shown. b The percentage of cytokine-positive cells among CD68+ monocytes (individual measurement and median) in response to the different stimuli in controls (C) (n = 26), patients with axSpA (SpA) (n = 42), and patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) (n = 8) is given. *P < 0.05; **P < 0.01 (Kruskal-Wallis test and Dunn’s post test). IL interleukin, TNFα tumour necrosis factor alpha