Background Discriminating between autoimmune pancreatitis (AIP), chronic pancreatitis (CP), and pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) can be complicated. 12 CP, and 12 PDAC, had been analyzed. Results Evaluating AIP and PDAC sufferers serum, higher concentrations had been within AIP for interleukins IL-1 BMS-790052 considerably, IL-7, IL-13, and granulocyte colony-stimulating aspect (G-CSF). G-CSF allowed discrimination of AIP from BMS-790052 CP also. Furthermore, once AIP was split into subtypes, considerably higher serum amounts for IL-7 and G-CSF had been assessed both in subtypes of AIP and in AIP-2 for IL-1 in comparison with PDAC. G-CSF and TNF- were significantly differentially expressed in tissues homogenates between AIP-2 and PDAC also. Conclusions The cytokines IL-1, IL-7, and G-CSF could be assessed in sufferers serum consistently, offering an non-invasive and elegant approach for differential diagnosis. G-CSF is an excellent candidate to dietary supplement the presently known serum markers in predictive lab tests for AIP and represents a basis for the combined blood check to differentiate AIP and especially AIP-2 from PDAC, improving the chance of suitable treatment. Electronic supplementary materials The online edition of this content (doi:10.1186/s12967-017-1227-3) contains supplementary materials, which is open to authorized users. for 10?min. Supernatants had been collected and split into aliquots, and the full total protein focus was determined utilizing a Pierce BCA assay (Thermo, Rockford, IL, USA). For multiplexing, the supernatants had been adjusted using a dilution buffer (Bio-Rad) to a complete protein focus of 600?g/ml and analyzed utilizing the Bio-Plex Pro Individual Cytokine 17-Plex -panel kit CD47 (Bio-Rad) based on the manufacturers protocol while described above. Statistical analyses Statistical analyses were performed using GraphPad Prism software (version 5; La Jolla, CA, USA) and IBM SPSS Statistics version 22 (IBM Corp, Armonk, NY, USA). As variables were not normally distributed, the nonparametric MannCWhitney test was used to BMS-790052 assess the significant differences in multiplexing assays of serum and tissue extracts. The quantitative variables are graphically presented as box-and-whisker plots. Values of p??0.05 were considered to be significant. All tests were used two-sided. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were calculated to analyze the test performance of serum cytokines G-CSF and IL-7 for predicting AIP using SAS software (release 9.4, SAS Institute, Inc., Cary, NC, USA). Logistic regression analysis was performed to generate sensitivity, specificity, and area under curve (AUC) values. Youdens J statistic was used to select the optimal predicted probability cut-off. Results Serum cytokine profiling All the comparisons on different cytokines were executed twice. At first, evaluations were performed between all AIP vs PDAC and CP patients and the reference category was always AIP. The comparison of serum BMS-790052 cytokine expression levels in the three different groups is summarized in Table?2. The statistical analysis of serum comparing AIP to PDAC revealed a significantly higher concentration in AIP patients for IL-1 (p?=?0.0221), for IL-7 (p?=?0.0003), for IL-13 (p?=?0.0337), and for G-CSF (p?=?0.0105). The G-CSF levels in AIP (median 14.23?pg/ml) were also significantly discriminatory between AIP and CP (1.47 pg/ml) (p?=?0.0006). Table?2 Comparison of cytokine levels in serum from: AIP, CP and PDAC patients Subsequently, comparisons were performed among the AIP-1, AIP-2, PDAC, and CP groups using AIP-1 and AIP-2 separately as reference categories. When AIP-1, AIP-2, CP, and PDAC were compared and AIP-1 was used as a reference category, significantly higher concentrations of IL-7 (p?=?0.0012), IL-13 (p?=?0.0162), and G-CSF (p?=?0.0425) were found in AIP-1 compared to PDAC. Also, a significantly higher level of G-CSF (p?=?0.0039) in AIP-1 compared to CP was noticed. When we compared AIP-2 with PDAC, we found significantly higher levels of IL-1 (p?=?0.0217), IL-7 (p?=?0.005), and G-CSF (p?=?0.032) in AIP-2. Comparing AIP-2 with CP, significantly higher levels in AIP-2 were found for IL-6 (p?=?0.0361), for IL-17 (p?=?0.0377), and G-CSF BMS-790052 (p?=?0.0034). The range of cytokine distribution in the analyzed groups is presented in Fig.?1aCi and the median concentrations with the IQR of analyzed samples are summarized in Additional file 1: Table S1. Fig.?1 Serum levels and distribution range of the most differentially expressed cytokines (aCi) from AIP-1, AIP-2, CP, and PDAC patients. Differences were considered statistically significant when the p value was less than 0.05 and are marked with an … In order to evaluate the diagnostic utility of cytokines IL-7 and G-CSF for predicting AIP, a ROC curve analysis was carried out using the AIP, CP, and PDAC cytokine serum data. The obtained results are summarized in Table?3. IL-7 discriminated.