Biliary interleukin 6 levels as indicators of hepatic allograft rejection in rats.

Interleukin 6 has recently been noted to be present during the rejection response to grafted organs. In this study, we investigated biliary and serum interleukin 6 levels following liver transplantation in rats. IL-6 levels in bile and serum of naive rats were below 0.6 U/ml and 0.5±0.2 U/ml (mean±SD), respectively. Both biliary and serum IL-6 levels showed high values (>10.0 U/ml and >1.6 U/ml, respectively) on the day after transplantation, which seemed to reflect the inflammatory status caused by the surgical stress. Later samplings showed that the kinetics of serum IL-6 differed among the animals without any definite feature related to graft rejection