Discrimination of two different clinical entities, acute-type and subacute-type, human fulminant hepatitis by peripheral blood lymphocyte subsets.
Human fulminant hepatitis tends to be classified into two groups: acute type (A-FH) and subacute type (S-FH). In order to define these two clinical entities more precisely, we examined and compared peripheral blood lymphocyte subsets in A-FH and S-FH patients. We found that S-FH patients had a higher prevalence of CD19+ B cells (31.1 +/- 7.6% in S-FH vs 12.7 +/- 3.7% in A-FH) and also a lower prevalence of CD3+T cells (50.2 +/- 8.7% in S-FH vs 65.6 +/- 10.5% in A-FH). Furthermore, by examining the absolute cell numbers of these subsets, we determined that their imbalance in S-FH was mainly due to a decrease in CD3+ T cells. Among several T cell subsets, the CD8+CD11b-T cell subset was elevated in A-FH and decreased in S-FH (6.1 +/- 2.1% in S-FH, 24.4 +/- 5.8% in A-FH, and 14.8 +/- 7.8% in control). Serial studies of two S-FH patients revealed that the imbalance of these lymphocyte subsets returned to their proper ratio together with the improvement of their liver injury. These results indicate that there might be a different immunological background between A-FH and S-FH.
Shimizu
T
T
Division of Medicine, Institute of Gastroenterology, Tokyo Women's Medical University, Japan.
Tokushige
K
K
Yamaguchi
N
N
Ishikawa
K
K
Hasegawa
K
K
Yamauchi
K
K
Hayashi
N
N
D016175:B-Lymphocyte Subsets; D005260:Female; D006501:Hepatic Encephalopathy / Q000097:blood* / Q000145:classification / Q000276:immunology; D006509:Hepatitis B / Q000097:blood*; D006526:Hepatitis C / Q000097:blood*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D016176:T-Lymphocyte Subsets