Abstract
Patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) display immune deficiency that is most obvious in advanced stage disease. Here we investigated whether this immune dysfunction plays a pathologic role in the progression of early stage disease patients. We carried out eight-color immunophenotyping analysis in a cohort of 110 untreated early stage CLL patients and 22 age-matched healthy donors and correlated our findings with clinical outcome data. We found a significant reduction in naive CD4(+) and CD8(+) T cells in CLL patients. Only the CD4(+) subset showed significantly increased effector memory cells (T(EM) and T(EMRA)) in the whole cohort (P = 0.004 and P = 0.04, respectively). However, patients with inverted CD4:CD8 ratios (52 of 110) showed preferential expansion of the CD8 compartment, with a skewing of CD8(+) T(EMRA) (P = 0.03) coupled with increased percentage of CD57(+)CD28(-)CD27(-) T cells (P = 0.008) and PD-1 positivity (P = 0.027), consistent with a replicative senescence phenotype. Furthermore, inverted CD4:CD8 ratios were associated with shorter lymphocyte doubling time (P = 0.03), shorter time to first treatment (P = 0.03), and reduced progression-free survival (P = 0.005). Our data show that the emergence of CD8(+)PD-1(+) replicative senescence phenotype in early stage CLL patients is associated with more aggressive clinical disease. Importantly, these findings were independent of tumor cell prognostic markers and could not be accounted for by patient age, changes in regulatory T-cell frequency, or cytomegalovirus serostatus (n = 217).
Highlights
Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is characterized by immunodeficiency of which hypogammaglobulinemia is the most clinically obvious [1]
Our data show that the emergence of CD8þPD-1þ replicative senescence phenotype in early stage CLL patients is associated with more aggressive clinical disease
We compared the frequency of peripheral blood lymphocyte populations in CLL patient samples and age-matched healthy donors (Supplementary Table S1)
Summary
Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is characterized by immunodeficiency of which hypogammaglobulinemia is the most clinically obvious [1]. Profound defects in cell-mediated immunity are a feature of this disease and patients usually have abnormalities in T-cell numbers and function [2,3,4,5]. Treatment with chemotherapy seems to exacerbate this problem by inducing T lymphopenia, thereby rendering patients more susceptible to infection [6]. A number of recent studies have shown abnormalities in the Authors' Affiliations: Departments of 1Infection, Immunity and Biochemistry, 2Oncology and Palliative Medicine, and 3Haematology, Cardiff University, Wales, United Kingdom. Note: Supplementary data for this article are available at Clinical Cancer Research Online (http://clincancerres.aacrjournals.org/).
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