Variations in serum TARC and I-TAC levels reflect minor changes in disease activity and pruritus in atopic dermatitis.

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic or relapsing inflam-matory skin disease. Scratching in AD patients results in proinflammatory cytokine and chemokine production. Thus, serum levels of monocyte chemotactic protein-1 (MCP-1), regulated on activation, normal T-cell expressed and secreted (RANTES ), macrophage inflammatory pro-tein (MIP)-1β, eotaxin, thymus and activation-regulated chemokine (TARC), and macrophage-derived chemokine (MDC) were increased in AD patients, compared with normal controls (1–4). With regards to Th1 chemokines such as interferon (IFN)-γ-inducible protein 10 (IP-10), IFN-γ-inducible T-cell α-chemoattractant (I-TAC), and monokine induced by IFN-γ (MIG), their expression in le-sional AD skin was confirmed by immunohistochemistry ±(5). They may negatively contribute to the development of AD because macrophages from AD patients produced lower levels of IP-10 compared to cells from healthy con -trols in response to α-toxin (6) and the expression of MIG and IP-10 was lower in Langerhans cells from patients with AD than from patients with psoriasis, whereas the opposite was observed for TARC and MDC (7).Visual analogue scale (VAS) is a valuable method to assess pruritus intensity in patients with pruritic der-matoses (8). In this study , we focus on temporal variation of pruritus in each patient and compare serum samples taken at different time points when there were only slight, if any, changes in disease activity. The aim of this study was to highlight the most sensitive chemokine associated with changes in pruritus in AD patients. MATERIALS AND METHODS