Antiserum against tumor necrosis factor enhances lipopolysaccharide fever in rats.

The role of tumor necrosis factor (TNF, cachectin), a putative endogenous pyrogen, was investigated by comparing fever and plasma TNF levels after the intraperitoneal and intramuscular injection of 10 micrograms/kg lipopolysaccharide (LPS) into male Sprague-Dawley rats and by neutralization of endogenous TNF using TNF antiserum. An intraperitoneal injection of LPS caused a biphasic fever that lasted approximately 6.5 h. TNF levels in these rats peaked at 657 +/- 222 U/ml at 1 h then declined to virtually undetectable levels by the fourth hour. The intramuscularly injected animals showed a lower monophasic fever and low sustained TNF levels (40 +/- 10 U/ml at 1 h, 18 +/- 11 U/ml at 4 h). In a second study, an antiserum that had been shown to neutralize rat TNF was injected intraperitoneally 2 h before the intramuscular injection of 10 micrograms/kg LPS. Control rats were injected with normal rabbit serum before LPS. During the second hour after the injection of LPS, the animals that received the antiserum developed fevers that tended to be lower than those seen in the rats that were injected with control serum (0.33 +/- 0.06 vs. 0.58 +/- 0.1), although this difference was not significant. However, during the third through eighth hours after LPS, the antiserum-injected rats had mean body temperatures that were significantly higher than those of the control rats (1.62 +/- 0.11 vs. 1.07 +/- 0.09; P = 0.0005).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)