Affiliation:
1. From the Division of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology, Department of Medicine, and from the Department of Surgery, University Hospital of Freiburg, Germany.
Abstract
Hypogammaglobulinemia is the hallmark of common variable immunodeficiency (CVID) syndrome, a heterogeneous disorder predisposing patients to recurrent bacterial infections. In this study, we investigated the peripheral B-cell compartment of 30 well-characterized CVID patients in comparison to 22 healthy controls. Flow cytometric analysis of peripheral blood lymphocytes revealed a reduction of class-switched CD27+IgM−IgD− memory B cells below 0.4% in 77% of our patients (group I), while this B-cell subpopulation exceeded 0.5% in all healthy donors and in 23% of CVID patients (group II). These results correlate well with the capacity of peripheral blood lymphocytes to produce immunoglobulins in vitro upon stimulation with Staphylococcus aureus Cowan I (SAC) plus interleukin-2 because the production of immunoglobulin G in vitro is entirely dependent on the presence of switched memory B cells. The subdivision of group I into patients with an increased proportion of CD21− peripheral B cells (> 20%; group Ia) and patients with normal percentages of CD21− B cells (< 20%; group Ib) revealed a significant clustering of patients with splenomegaly and autoimmune cytopenias in group Ia. Based on these observations, we propose a fast and reliable new classification for CVID patients by flow cytometric quantification of class-switched memory and immature B cells in the peripheral blood of patients. Our results point toward defects at various stages of B-cell differentiation in CVID subgroups and support the value of a B-cell–oriented classification principle. A consensus on this new classification system will hopefully provide a tool for rapidly defining homogeneous subgroups of CVID for functional studies and genetic linkage analysis.
Publisher
American Society of Hematology
Subject
Cell Biology,Hematology,Immunology,Biochemistry
Cited by
511 articles.
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