OXIDATIVE-ANTIOXIDATIVE COMPOUNDS AND LIPID PARAMETERS AS POTENTIAL DIAGNOSTIC AND PROGNOSTIC MARKERS IN ANIMALS WITH SIRS

Nowadays in veterinary medicine the discrimination between an inflammatory status and a systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) sometimes related to an infectious disease and with a poorer prognosis, could be difficult, both for the clinicians and the clinical pathologists. An early diagnosis would permit to avoid unnecessary use of antibiotics (mainly to contain the problem of antibiotic resistance) and to establish an appropriate monitoring plan. The aim of the two first described works was to validate in horses the Paraoxonase-1 (PON-1), a negative acute phase protein already used in dogs; 120 healthy horses of different sex, age and breed were enrolled; then, this protein was evaluated as a possible diagnostic and prognostic markers of SIRS in this species; PON-1 did not seem to be useful to this aim. The prognostic value was not evaluable because of the small amount of survivors in the SIRS group that did not permit a serial evaluation of PON-1 values. The second part of the thesis is about the Protein Carbonyls (PCOs), that are already used as sepsis markers in humans; a Western Blotting method was initially validated to detect PCOs in canine serum from healthy patients; then, a spectrophotometric method, that could be cheaper and faster than the first one, was employed. With this method, serum from healthy dogs and from dogs with septic or non-septic inflammation was used to measure PCOs. Results between groups were compared to evaluate if PCOs could be considered as possible diagnostic markers of sepsis in association with PON-1 and C-reactive protein (CRP). This marker seemed to be useful to distinguish dogs with sepsis from dogs with sterile inflammation or healthy, but not to give prognostic information. An increase in the amount of the enrolled dogs would consent to enforce the hypothesis that PCOs could become a reliable support to diagnose sepsis.