Development of a method of nasal secretions sampling for local nasal inflammation studies

ABSTRACT

Background

Analysis of immune markers in nasal secretions has become crucial in the study of nasal diseases. We proposed the cotton piece method, a modified method, for the collection and processing of nasal secretions.

Methods

The nasal secretions of 31 healthy control participants and 32 patients with nasal diseases were collected by the traditional sponge method and the cotton piece method, respectively. The concentrations of 14 cytokines and chemokines related to nasal diseases were detected.

Results

The properties of nasal secretions collected by the cotton piece method were more uniform than the sponge method. The concentration of IL-6 in the disease group collected by the cotton piece method was significantly higher than that in the control group (P = 0.002), and the cotton piece method could distinguish the positive detection rates of IL-1β (P = 0.031) and TNF-α (P = 0.001) between the control and disease groups. The levels of inflammatory mediators in nasal secretions could preliminarily distinguish different nasal diseases.

Conclusions

The cotton piece method is a noninvasive and reliable method for collecting nasal secretions, which is beneficial for detecting local inflammatory and immune responses of the nasal mucosa.

KEYWORDS:

• Allergic rhinitis
• chronic rhinosinusitis
• cytokines
• cotton piece
• nasal secretions
• sponge

Acknowledgments

We thank all of the patients in this study for their cooperation.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Author contributions

All the authors contributed significantly to the study: X Zhang, C Wang, Y Zhang and K Wang collected the data. X Xu, D Liu and Y Wang performed the experiments. X Xu and X Zhang wrote the manuscript. J Li and L Zhang designed and supervised the study. All authors had final approval of the manuscript version to be published and are accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring the accuracy and integrity of this manuscript.

Ethical approval

This study was approved by the ethics committee of Beijing Tongren Hospital of Capital Medical University (TRECKY2021–043, 2021). All patients provided informed consent, and the study protocol complied with the ethical guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1744666X.2023.2228493.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from national key R&D program of China (2022YFC2504100), the program for the Changjiang scholars and innovative research team (IRT13082), CAMS innovation fund for medical sciences (2019-I2M-5-022), Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission (Z211100002921057), Capital’s funds for health improvement and research (2022-1-1091) and the Natural Science Foundation of China (81970849, 82071022, 82271141).