Positive serology for Lyme disease borrelias in primary cutaneous B-cell lymphoma: a study in 22 patients; is it a fortuitous finding?
In conclusion there appears to be a clustering of positive serology for Lyme disease Borrelias in PCBCL patients possibly related to an ethiopathogenic relationship. Mechanisms of Borrelia escape from immunosurveillance mechanisms, persistence of both their mitogenic and antigenic stimuli for B-cells, and SALT formation may be involved in the pathogenesis of a subset of PCBCL.
The reported associations of IL-6 -174G with high IL-6 production and IL-10 -592 with low IL-10 production and our own results support a role of genetically determined dysregulated cytokine production in disease severity. The lack of association of these genotypes with RF and anti-CCP antibody status suggests that they act downstream of autoantibody production. We conclude that IL-6 and IL-10 genotypes may be useful in predicting disease severity in autoantibody-positive and autoantibody-negative patients, respectively.