Therefore, IL-6 and TGF-β1 were selected due to their direct involvement in the specific pathways such as IL6/JAK/STAT3 and TGF-β1/SMAD linking periodontitis (Aukkarasongsup et al., 2013; Dou et al., 2024) and renal pathology (Chen et al., 2019; Tang et al., 2021). Here, STAT3 is linked to periodontitis.