ArticleFrontiers in medicine2026
TREC dynamics as a biomarker of naive T-cell homeostasis in traumatic brain injury: a longitudinal analysis.
Article in Frontiers in medicine, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Genetic Determinants of T-Cell Homeostasis in Critical Illness: An Exploratory Analysis of Immune Gene Variants and TREC Dynamics.Journal of personalized medicine · 2026Article
- Nanomaterial-enhanced biosensors for traumatic brain injury biomarker detection: a review of analytical performance, machine learning integration, clinical validation, and point-of-care translation.Frontiers in neurology · 2026Review
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Post-traumatic immunosuppression complicates recovery from traumatic brain injury (TBI), increasing susceptibility to infection. Reliable biomarkers to assess immune status are required. We investigated the dynamics of T-cell receptor excision circles (TREC) and B-cell K-deleting recombination excision circles (KREC) as potential markers of immune homeostasis in TBI patients. In this observational study, 51 patients with moderate-to-severe TBI were enrolled. Serial peripheral blood samples were collected for the purpose of quantifying TREC and KREC levels using real-time PCR. Linear mixed-effects models (LMMs) were employed to analyze the longitudinal dynamics and identify clinical predictors. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was applied to construct a composite severity/inflammation index, and the final model was validated using a cluster bootstrap procedure. In most patients, the baseline TREC level was close to or below the lower age-matched norms. TREC and KREC levels fluctuated greatly, with non-monotonic changes and multi-fold variations. Three patients with decreasing TREC dynamics subsequently succumbed to sepsis. Lower TREC levels were robustly associated with older age and a higher severity/inflammation index (
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