Abstract
BACKGROUND: A higher incidence of herpes zoster (HZ) was found in people with decreased cell-mediated immunity. However, the relationship between cellular immunity and HZ infection in patients with autoimmune inflammatory rheumatic diseases (AIRD) remains elusive. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the role of CD4/CD8 ratio in patients with AIRD and HZ. METHODS: This case-control study compared AIRD patients with and without HZ. We chose 70 AIRD patients with HZ as the experimental group and 140 AIRD patients without HZ as the control group. The clinical and laboratory findings were assessed in each trial participant. RESULTS: The CD4/CD8 ratio (odds ratio [OR], 0.22; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.10-0.49) was independently associated with the occurrence of HZ after adjusting for various confounders. Nonlinear analysis has unveiled a more profound nonlinear relationship between the CD4/CD8 ratio and the occurrence of HZ in patients with AIRD. The OR of HZ increased with a decreasing CD4/CD8 ratio before the turning point of 2. The adjusted regression coefficient was 0.14 (95% CI, 0.05-0.37, p<0.0001) for CD4/CD8 ratio less than 2. CONCLUSION: The CD4/CD8 ratio was expected to be a very promising quantitative biomarker for predicting the risk of developing HZ in patients with AIRD.