Allergy, Asthma and Immunology: Increased Level of Basophil CD203c Expression Predicts Severe Chronic Urticaria

Original Article

Open Access

J Korean Med Sci. 2014 Jan;29(1):43-47. English. Published online 2013 December 26. http://dx.doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2014.29.1.43
© 2014 The Korean Academy of Medical Sciences.


Young-Min Ye, Eun-Mi Yang, Hye-Soo Yoo, Yoo-Seob Shin, Seung-Hyun Kim and Hae-Sim Park
Department of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Ajou University School of Medicine, Suwon, Korea.
Address for Correspondence: Hae-Sim Park, MD. Department of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Ajou University School of Medicine, 164 Worldcup-ro, Yongtong-gu, Suwon 443-721, Korea. Tel: +82.31-219-5150, Fax: +82.31-219-4265, Email: hspark@ajou.ac.kr

Received September 24, 2013; Accepted November 08, 2013.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract
Increased FcεR1α expression with upregulated CD203c expression on peripheral basophils is seen in patients with chronic urticaria (CU). However, there has been no published report on the association between CD203c expression level and clinical disease activity in CU patients. To investigate whether the increase of basophil activation is associated with the disease activity of CU, we measured basophil CD203c expression using a tricolor flow cytometric method in 82 CU patients and 21 normal controls. The relationship between the percentage of CD203c-expressing basophils and clinical parameters was analyzed. The mean basophil CD203c expression was significantly higher in CU patients than in healthy controls (57.5% vs 11.6%, P < 0.001). The basophil CD203c expression in severe CU patients was significantly higher than in non-severe CU (66.5% ± 23.3% vs 54.0% ± 23.3%, P = 0.033). Multiple logistic regression analysis indicated that both ≥ 72% basophil CD203c expression and urticaria activity score (UAS)≥ 13 were significant predictors of severe CU (P = 0.005 and P = 0.032, respectively). These findings suggest that the quantification of basophil activation with CD203c at baseline may be used as a potential predictor of severe CU requiring another treatment option beyond antihistamines.