Sick as a Dog: Cytokine Profile of Domestic Panamanian Canines

Abstract

Cytokines are small proteins that act as messengers for the immune system. These cytokines trigger different immune responses, allowing the body to fight diseases and viruses. The immune system works in a tightly regulated system, where responses depend on the pleiotropic and complex nature of cytokines. Due to their diverse function, cytokines are difficult to understand from individual studies and instead require a large bank of knowledge on levels in both disease and healthy situations. Here, we collected baseline cytokine levels of ninety-nine domestic Panamanian dogs and looked at how demographic characteristics like age, sex, body condition, and community affected these concentrations. We found that many dogs exhibited very low cytokine levels and that only community had a substantial effect on cytokine levels. Our results demonstrate how important it is to understand the baseline cytokine levels for the dogs in the community that you are treating, and that much more research will be necessary to use cytokines effectively in medicine.