Serum-C-reactive protein (CRP) and 25 (OH)-VitD3 levels inversely correlated in control but not in asthmatic pre-school children
C-reactive protein (CRP) is a plasma protein, whose levels rise in response to inflammation and infections. It is an hepatic acute-phase protein that increases following interleukin-6 secretion by macrophages and T cells. Its physiological role is to bind to lysophosphatidylcholine expressed on the surface of dead or dying cells (and some types of bacteria) promoting phagocytosis by macrophages, which clears necrotic and apoptotic cells and bacteria. In healthy adults, the normal concentrations of CRP varies between 0.8 mg/L to 3.0 mg/L. However, some healthy adults show elevated CRP at 10 mg/L. The plasma half-life of CRP is 19 hours.21 We next asked if serum CRP level at recruitment in our cohort of children correlated with their serum level of 25(OH)VitD3.
The design of the study is reported in Fig 1a and the levels of CRP of the cohorts are reported in Table 1 . We noticed that both control and asthmatic children group had one child with low 25(OH)VitD3 (less than 20 ng/ml) and very high CRP. We next correlated 25(OH)VitD3 and serum CRP levels without this very high CRP value in both cohorts (Fig 1b,c and d,e) and next in asthma we analyzed only data with CRP data lower than 2.5mg/ml, to be in the CRP range of controls (Fig 1f ) and looked at the correlation with serum VitD3. Here we found that, control but not asthmatic children had an inverse correlation between their serum CRP value and serum 25(OH)VitD3 levels (Fig1c ). Considering the CRP value in asthma, we noticed they were higher as compared to control children, indicating an ongoing infection, inflammation in these asthmatic children (Fig 1e).