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(Circulation. 1998;97:2279-2281.)
© 1998 American Heart Association, Inc.

Correspondence

Dexamethasone Downregulates L-Selectin In Vitro and In Vivo

Bernd Jilma, MD; ; Petra Stohlawetz, MD

Departments of Clinical Pharmacology and Transfusion Medicine, The Adhesion Research Group Elaborating Therapeutics, Vienna University Hospital School Medicine, Vienna, Austria

To the Editor:

We read with interest the paper by Filep et al,¹ who showed that dexamethasone attenuated the downregulation of L-selectin expression induced by platelet activating factor while not affecting basal expression of L-selectin on neutrophils. They discuss that the "results appear to differ from those of Burton et al, who found that in vivo glucocorticoid treatment induced significant downregulation of both L-selectin and CD18 expression on resting bovine neutrophils. However, these effects of glucocorticoids became detectable only 8 to 16 hours and 2 to 3 days after treatment, respectively. The delayed response, combined with the fact that neutrophils reside in the peripheral blood for only a few hours, would suggest that in cows glucocorticoids affected neutrophil precursors in bone marrow rather than circulating neutrophils."

Similar to the results from previous studies in cattle² and in rats,³ we have recently found that dexamethasone also downregulates basal L-selectin expression on neutrophils in humans, with a lag time of 8 hours.⁴ However, this need not necessarily be due to an effect of dexamethasone on neutrophil precursors, because neutrophils recently released from the bone marrow may exhibit even higher levels of L-selectin expression.⁵ Also, the neutrophil half-life is significantly prolonged when glucocorticoids are administered,⁶ and L-selectin seems to decrease on aged neutrophils.⁷ Therefore, it is conceivable that downregulation of L-selectin expression by a direct or indirect mechanism could occur on circulating neutrophils and could also account in part for the increase in neutrophil half-life, or vice versa.

While in vitro . . . [Full Text of this Article]

János G. Filep, MD; ; Éva Földes-Filep, MD

Research Center, Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital, Department of Medicine, University of Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada

This article has been cited by other articles:

				P. S. D. Weber, T. Toelboell, L.-C. Chang, J. D. Tirrell, P. M. Saama, G. W. Smith, and J. L. Burton Mechanisms of glucocorticoid-induced down-regulation of neutrophil L-selectin in cattle: evidence for effects at the gene-expression level and primarily on blood neutrophils J. Leukoc. Biol., May 1, 2004; 75(5): 815 - 827. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]