Oxidative stress in early stages of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a common respiratory condition characterized by an irreversible or partial irreversible airway obstruction. Since oxidative stress and inflammation play an important role in the pathophysiology of the disease, our target was to evaluate biomarkers index of these conditions in order to find out one or more biomarkers that can predict the onset and the progression of the pathology.We analyzed oxidative stress and inflammation biomarkers in 29 mild COPD, 14 moderate COPD and in 43 healthy controls. Results obtained show the decrease of PSH levels in COPD patients from the early stage of COPD and the increase is higher with COPD progression. Furthermore, COPD patients presented high ADMA/arginine ratio, low levels of global DNA methylation, high levels of kynurenine and kyn/trp ratio and low levels of tryptophan compared to healthy controls. In addition, the alterations of these biomarkers are further greater with the progression of the disease.Concluding, our results underline the importance of oxidative stress in COPD presence and severity. Indeed, our data show the alteration of the pathways analyzed due principally to oxidative stress. So, it might be interesting to increase the number of subjects of the study and to include patients with severe form of COPD to fully characterized the impact of oxidative stress in this pathology.