Decreased ratio of CD4/CD8 lymphocytes might be predictive for successful interferon alpha and lamivudine combined therapy in childhood chronic hepatitis B infection: A preliminary study

Abstract

This study emphasizes the importance of increased pretreatment CD8+ lymphocyte percentages leading to a significant decrease in CD4/CD8 ratio in chronic hepatitis B virus infection of childhood as an immunological factor predicting response to treatment.

Determination of intracellular Th1/Th2 type cytokines in lymphocytes of chronic hepatitis B patients treated with interferon-alpha

“…The responsive patients had low pre-treatment ratios of CD4+/CD8+. This was because of high CD8+ T cells, revealing the importance of CD8+ T cell amount for the clearance of HBV (21). In our study, CD4+ T cell percentages were significantly lower than in controls before treatment with relatively increased CD8+ T cells (data not shown).…”

“…Unal et al (20) showed that CD3+ T cells were higher in chronic hepatitis B patients more obviously than CD8+ T cells. In a study by Genel et al (21), combined therapy of IFN-α and lamivudine was given to chronic hepatitis B patients, and the only significant factor predicting immune response was found to be the pretreatment CD4+/CD8+ T cell ratios. The responsive patients had low pre-treatment ratios of CD4+/CD8+.…”

“…The post-treatment unresponsive group had decreased levels of Tc1 type cytokines with statistical significance. Genel et al (21) suggested that unresponsiveness was correlated with low Tc percentages. However, in our study, no statistical difference between the cytokine profiles of responders and the healthy group was observed.…”

T lymphocyte Subsets Determination and DNA Ploidy Analysis in the Differential Diagnosis between Benign and Malignant Ascites

“…CD8 + has an important effect on immunity due to the immunological inhibition of T lymphocyte. The ratio CD4 + /CD8 + is used as an important index that determines the character of an immune response (7)(8)(9)(10). In this study, we found that in descending order of CD3 + , CD4 + and CD4 + /CD8 + in ascitic fluid, these were tuberculous peritonitis, malignant ascites and liver cirrhosis and in descending order of CD8 + , and these were malignant ascites, tuberculous peritonitis and liver cirrhosis.…”