Abstract
Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is a connective tissue disease of unknown etiology. Since the most important clinical feature is thought to be the fibrosis of systemic organs, a lot of studies concerning tissue fibrosis were performed in vivo and in vitro. Several cytokines and growth factors were reported to be increased in SSc patients' sera and to be excessively expressed in various tissues, suggesting that they might play crucial roles in the immunopathogenesis of SSc.
Hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) was first described as a potent mitogen for adult rat hepatocytes in primary culture. Recent studies revealed that HGF targets a wide variety of epithelial cells including fibroblasts and that it has multiple biological properties in regulating cell proliferation, migration, morphogenesis, development and regeneration. Increased levels of serum HGF were observed in several fibrotic disorders including fulminant hepatitis, and HGF may be one of the promising candidates for serum marker of the tissue fibrosis.
In this study, we examined whether the level of serum HGF increased in SSc patients compared to that in normal controls and estimated the relationship between the level of serum HGF and the extent of the fibrosis in SSc.
