Abstract
BACKGROUND: Alveolar echinococcosis (AE) is a zoonotic parasitic disease caused by Echinococcus multilocularis larval tapeworm infections in humans that severely impairs the health of affected patients in the northern hemisphere. METHODS: The expression levels of 20 cytokines associated with AE infection were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, and the correlations between these cytokines were analysed in the R programming language. RESULTS: Serum cytokine levels differed among individuals in both the AE patient and healthy control groups. The results of the correlations among the cytokines showed obvious differences between the two groups. In the AE patients group, Th1 and Th2 cytokines formed a more complicated network than that in the healthy control group. CONCLUSIONS: The altered correlations between Th1 and Th2 cytokines may be closely associated with AE infection, which may provide a new explanation for the essential differences between AE patients and healthy individuals.