Table 1.

Paracrine activation of NF-κB in human oesophageal fibroblasts (HOF) cells following exposure to Human oesophageal squamous (HOS) conditioned medium

		Paracrine NF-κB activation in HOF cells
HOS exposure regime		Patient 1		Patient 2		Patient 3
Insult	Interval (minutes)	% of pH 7.4 response	P-value	% of pH 7.4 response	P-value	% of pH 7.4 response	P-value
pH 5	0 (single treatment)	94.6	0.3286	100.6	0.2376	103.7	0.2776
	5	224.1	<0.0001***	173.1	<0.0001***	119.9	0.0106*
	30	218.5	<0.0001***	168.8	<0.0001***	119.5	0.0034**
pH 4	0 (single treatment)	116.2	0.0116*	120.8	0.0629	95.1	0.0893
	5	134.7	<0.0001***	155.8	0.0001***	98.0	0.1243
	30	1.0	0.5162	131.4	0.0812	127.8	0.0014**

Conditioned medium experiments demonstrated variable but statistically significant activation of NF-κB in fibroblasts in response to exposure to culture medium conditioned by HOS cells following an acidic insult. Acid treatments were either pulsatile, with three 3-min exposures separated by 5- or 30-min intervals at pH 7.4, or a single 30-min exposure. The response and P-values are relative to the internal control experiment (HOS cells from the same patient exposed to pH 7.4 using the same treatment regime). Results in bold indicate those which are significantly greater (***P ≤ 0.001, **P ≤ 0.01, *P ≤ 0.05).