Characteristic No Age(range)/ years M/F ratio Average of lesion duration Iranian J Parasitol: Vol. 7, No.1, 2012, pp. 18-25 Table 1: Major characteristics of study groups Study group Healing 10 18-60 8/2 3.1 month Non-healing 10 22-65 10/0 2.3 year Fig. 1: PCR product of the internal transcribed spacer1 (ITS1) region of genomic DNA samples from healing and non-healing patients’ lesions. DNA from L.major (MRHO/IR/75/ER) used as control (C). No.1, 2 3 are samples from healing patients and No.4, 5 are obtained from non-healing individuals. M, is DNA ladder 50 bp (Fermentas) Fig. 2: Cytokine production from macrophages in patients’ with healing and non healing lesions. Mac- rophages were stimulated with or without live L. ma- jor promastigotes. After 24 hours supernatants were assayed for IL-23 production. Results were obtained by an ELISA assay. Difference between cytokine production in stimulated and unstimulated macro- phages in healing group (a), difference between cy- tokine production in stimulated and unstimulated macrophages in non- healing group(b)and difference between a and b(c). Data are expressed as the mean ± standard deviation of the mean. Significant differ- ences were shown between these groups (P < 0.001) 22 Available at: http://ijpa.tums.ac.ir