Peripheral blood intracellular cytokine analysis in children newly diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease.

Patterns of cytokine profiles have emerged for different forms of inflammatory bowel disease with a predominance of type 1 cytokines in patients with Crohn disease and type 2 cytokine expression in patients with ulcerative colitis. Most of these studies have involved older patients with long-standing disease or after various therapeutic interventions, and patterns of cytokine expression were hypothesized to be influenced by these factors. To evaluate for these possibilities, we studied 23 patients (15 boys) with newly diagnosed Crohn disease (n = 14) or ulcerative colitis.