The relationship between disease activity, treatment response, and immunologic reactivity in immunoblastic lymphadenopathy: A longitudinal study of treatment with levamisole and cytostatics

Abstract

In a longitudinal study, several immunologic in vitro tests were performed on peripheral lymphocytes in four patients with immunoblastic lymphadenopathy during sequential therapy with Levamisole and polychemotherapy. The percentage of T cells tended to fall with increasing disease activity, while the percentage of B cells remained almost constant. Blast transformation tests showed that both the T-cell and B-cell responses are defective and that improvement in disease status is correlated closely with an improvement of the blast transformation response. Levamisole treatment improved the blast transformation response but did not produce clinical remission in contrast to polychemotherapy, which produced clinical remission as well as improvement of the blast transformation response. No conclusions about the pathogenesis of this disease could be made in the present study. No proof was found of a primary defective T-cell function (including T-suppressor activity) although the available methods did not preclude this possibility completely.