This study, published in Blood, highlights the limited data on epidemiologic factors that impact immune profiles of patients with hematologic malignancies. The study’s flow cytometric analyses of different hematologic malignancy immune panels with regard to age, race, and sex will be presented at the 2021 ASH Annual Meeting & Exposition.
Flow cytometric analyses of immune panels including T-cell, B-cell, NK cell, and dendritic cell subsets were conducted on a group of 1,025 adult patients with hematologic malignancies and controls/donors from 2006 to 2016. Diagnoses included in the analyses were acute myeloid leukemia (AML), multiple myeloma (MM), non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), myelodysplastic diseases/myeloproliferative neoplasms (MDS/MPN), acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), Hodgkin lymphoma (HL), and other leukemias.
Data collected from patients included sex, age, self-report of race (Hispanic, non-Hispanic white, African American, and other), and hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT)-specific comorbidity index (HCT-CI).
The researchers found that patients with lymphoid disease, such as HL, had lower CD3+CD4+ cells but higher CD3+CD8+ cells, NK cells, and dendritic cells. Moreover, there were significant differences in proportions of multiple types of cells between males and females with hematologic malignancies.
With regard to race, non-Hispanic whites with or without hematologic malignancies had higher CD8+ central memory cells than African Americans, Hispanics, and other races. The researchers also uncovered how as patients increased in age, there was a significant increase in activated HLA-DR T-cells, while T-γδ cells, CD8+ naïve cells, and recent thymic emigrants significantly decreased. Finally, common co-morbidities did not broadly influence immune cell profiles in patients with hematologic malignancies.
The researchers concluded that studies of immunophenotyping in hematologic malignancies should adjust for confounders of age, sex, and race, and consider the influence of patient disease and prior treatments on immune cell profiles [1].
Source:
[1] Herr, M. M., Wallace, P. K., Zhang, Y., Chen, G. L., Balderman, S. R., Ross, M., Ho, C., Hillengass, J., Wang, E. S., Przespolewski, A., Griffiths, E. A., Torka, P., Hernandez-Ilizaliturri, F. J., Ghione, P., McCarthy, P. L., & Hahn, T. E. (2021). Age, sex and self-reported race differences in immune profiles of hematologic malignancy patients. Blood, 138(Supplement 1), 4066. https://doi.org/10.1182/blood-2021-150954
