TNF and bacterial vaginosis: It would be reasonable to predict that having an elevation of the predominant cytokine ration (i.e., IL-1β/IP-10) would yield similar distributions of other cytokines given the correlation levels observed in Fig. 2B and D. However, when comparing the molecular BV-positive to BV-negative women with low levels of IL-1β/IP-10, we observed that the BV-positive women had elevated levels of TNF-α/MIP-1β inflammatory cytokines.