Laboratory results included blood routine, leucocyte subsets and blood biochemical parameters were collected. The level of inflammatory cytokines was measured using human validated commercially available kit from R&D Systems (MN, USA): human IL-6 Quantikine ELISA Kit (Cat# S6050), human IL-1 beta/IL-1F2 Quantikine ELISA Kit (Cat# SLB50) and human TNF-α Quantikine ELISA Kit (Cat# STA00D). In the case of IL-6, the normal range of this cytokine in sera is between 0 and 7 pg/ml [17]. We used intra-assay precision and inter-assay precision methods to evaluate precision in this study.