Modern approaches to the comprehensive assessment of the human immune status under radiation exposure. Review (part 1)

Testing certain immunological data at a specific time point is insufficient for proper immunodiagnostics and the patients’ health status. To diagnose and treat immune-related diseases, clinical immunologists perform comprehensive examination of a patient. They interpret results of the laboratory immunological analyses with the account of the medical data on the person’s health status including the clinical picture and the past medical history. The laboratory study of patient’s immune status parameters in dynamics is the most informative. Together with the development of immunology methodological approaches and spectra of the analyzed immunity parameters change quickly and fundamentally. It complicates the comparison of the primary immunological data obtained in the studied groups in various periods of time. The first part of the analytical review presents the important scientific data on the strengths and limitations of such methodological approaches to the comprehensive assessment of the immune status as: the analysis of the relationship between the microbiome and the body on the whole (in particular, the study of the intestinal microbiota and species composition of the automicroflora of the skin); the study of the cytokine profile and the expression of the cytokine-coding genes; comprehensive assessment of the immunity parameters using the calculation of the hematological indices. Alternative methods will be considered in the second part of the review.