Adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma and its clinical subtypes from the viewpoints of viral etiology.

Abstract

Adult T-cell leukemia-lymphoma (ATL) has been accepted as a well-established clinieohematological disease entity with a special geographical distribution. Re- cent progress in research on ATL has disclosed that: (a) ATL cells have the inducer/helper T-cell phenotype (Hattori etal. 1981; Shimoyama etal. 1981, 1982b; Tobinai etal. 1982, 1983); (b) human T-cell leukemia virus (HTLV) and its associated antigens are always detected in cultured ATL cells (Pomsz etal. 1980; Hinuma etal. 1981; Miyoshi etal. 1982a; Hoshino etal. 1983a); (c) patients with ATL have antibody to HTLV (Hinuma etal. 1981, 1982b; Ichimaru etal. 1982; Robert-Guroff etal. 1982; Shimoyama etal. 1982a; Yunoki et al. 1982; Kinoshita et al. 1982b); (d) HTLV proviral DNA is inte- grated into the chromosomal DNA of cultured leukemia cell lines from ATL as well as of fresh ATL cells (Yoshida et al. 1982a, b; Hoshino et al. 1983a); (e) normal peripheral blood T cells can be transformed by cocultivation with an HTLV-producing cell line, and the same HTLV can be detected in the transformed cells (Miyoshi et al. 1981 a, b, 1982b; Hinuma et al. 1982a). In addition to these findings, seroepidemiological studies have revealed that anti-HTLV antibodies are frequently present in the sera of healthy adults who were born and lived in ATL-endemic areas (Hinuma etal. 1981, 1982b; Ichimaru etal. 1982), seropositive healthy adults may be carriers of HTLV (Miyoshi et al. 1982a; Ohkochi etal. 1984) and ATL has developed in anti-HTLV-positive healthy adults (Kinoshita et al. 1982a).KeywordsMycosis FungoidesClinical SubtypeJapan Scientific SocietyLeukemic StageMonoclonal IntegrationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.