Journal of Clinical and Cellular Immunology
Open Access
ISSN: 2155-9899
ISSN: 2155-9899
Héctor O Rodríguez A
Accepted Abstracts: J Clin Cell Immunol
Aims: Chagas disease pathology is dependent on the infecting T. cruzi strain. However, the relationship between the extent and type of myocarditis caused by different T. cruzi strains in the acute and chronic phases of infection has not been studied in detail. To address this, we infected mice with three genetically distant T. cruzi strains as well as infected in vitro different cell types. Methods and Results: Parasitemia was detected in mice infected with the Y and VFRA strains, but not with the Sc43 strain; however, only the Y strain was lethal. When infected with VFRA, mice showed higher inflammation and parasitism in the heart than with Sc43 strain. Y and VFRA caused homogeneous pancarditis with inflammatory infiltrates along the epicardium, whereas Sc43 caused inflammation preferentially in the auricles in association with intracellular parasite localization. We observed intramyocardic perivasculitis in mice infected with the VFRA and Y strains, but not with Sc43, during the acute phase, which suggests that endothelial cells may be involved in heart colonization by these more virulent strains. In in vitro infection assays, the Y strain had the highest parasite-cell ratio in epithelial, macrophage and endothelial cell lines, but Y and VFRA strains were higher than Sc43 in cardiomyocytes. Conclusions: This study supports parasite variability as a cause for the diverse cardiac outcomes observed in Chagas disease, and suggests that endothelial cells could be involved in heart infection during the acute phase.
Giovani Marino Favero is an Adjunct Professor at the State University of Ponta Grossa. He guides Master?s and Doctoral students of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Evolutionary Biology programs. He is currently Head of the Department of General Biology, Coordinator of the Ethics Committee on Animal Use, Editor-in-Chief of the magazine Publication UEPG Biological and Health Sciences. He works with associated gut immunology, drug development and cancer.