Depressed Levels of Granular Lymphocytes with Natural Killer (NK) Cell Function in 247 Cancer Patients

作者：Charles M. Balch, Arabella B. Tilden, Patricia A. Dougherty, Gretchen A. Cloud, Toru Abo · 发表于：Annals of Surgery · 年份：1983 · DOI：10.1097/00000658-198308000-00014 · 被引用次数：78 · 研究领域：Immune Cell Function and Interaction、Cancer Immunotherapy and Biomarkers、T-cell and B-cell Immunology

The HNK-1 (Leu-7) monoclonal antibody was used to enumerate and characterize the level of blood granular lymphocytes in 247 cancer patients. The results were compared to 146 control individuals. A fluorescence-activated cell sorter was used to purify blood HNK-1+ cells from cancer patients. The monoclonal antibody identified a homogeneous population of granular lymphocytes with greater than 95% purity. Conversely, virtually 100% of HNK-1- cells from cancer patients were agranular lymphocytes. These results were the same as previously observed in normal individuals, where the HNK-1+ cell fraction contained all the lymphocytes with spontaneous cytotoxicity in natural killer (NK) and killer (K) cell assays. The level of HNK-1+ cells in cancer patients correlated significantly with the patient's age and sex, with older individuals having higher levels and male patients containing a higher proportion than female patients. The levels in the cancer patients were significantly lower than normal controls (p = 0.04). When the results were subdivided by the histologic type of cancer, additional differences were noted. Compared to age and sex-matched controls, significantly depressed levels of HNK-1+ granular lymphocytes were observed in 49 patients with colon cancer (9.7% vs. 15.8%, p = 0.0001), 18 patients with lung carcinoma (11.7% vs. 27.0%, p = 0.0001), 24 patients with breast carcinoma (12.0% vs. 15.5%, p = 0.04) and 64 patients with head and neck carcinoma (15.9% vs. 19.1%, p = 0....