Dexamethasone-administrated BALB/c mouse promotes proinflammatory cytokine expression and reduces CD4⁺CD25⁺ regulatory T cells population

Dexamethasone has been known as an immunosuppressive drug that globally used to ameliorate a variety of inflammation disorders. However, long-term treatment can induce undesirable effects. With this intention, the experiment aimed to generalize and to explore the effect of dexamethasone in physiological regulations including an immune system on the healthy two-weeks-old BALB/c mice. A bioinformatics approach was used to predict molecules interaction and ligand-protein networking. Furthermore, the BD FACS CaliburTM was used to count the population number of regulatory T cells and the expression of TNF-α and IFN-γ which produced by CD4 T cells in the spleen. In addition, the Haematoxylin-Eosin staining was performed to detect necrosis incidents in excretory organs. Presently, based on ligand-protein networking analysis we found that dexamethasone has wide range effects on several metabolisms and pathways. On the other hand, single dose administration of dexamethasone significantly increases IFN-γ pro-inflammatory cytokines expression. On top of that, it induces necrosis in both liver and kidney tissue. Therefore, the study about dexamethasone is still needed in order to evaluate their effects on the other several physiological mechanisms.