• Online Features  This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Joseph Layon, MD
Gainesville, Fla

Michael Warzynski, PhD
Boston

Ahamed Idris, MD
Chicago

Arch Intern Med. 1985;145(11):2136.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

—We are pleased by the thoughtful comments of Tor et al in response to our above-referenced study of hospitalized intravenous drug abusers. In addition to presenting new data, this letter questions the significance of abnormalities in both function and number of lymphocytes in non-longitudinal studies of acute illness. In fact, this query cuts to the heart of what should be, but is not, a growing controversy: How does one use and interpret clinical tests, such as immunophenotypic studies, that are suggestive of a disease but are influenced by many non—disease-related factors?

We agree that there are many infections that may affect the T-cell subsetting technique. Patient characteristics such as sexual preference and history of drug abuse are important, as are underlying disease, age, and methodologic details such as the time of sampling.^1-8 Anesthesia may inhibit lymphocyte transformation as measured by response to mitogens.⁹ A further complication of immunophenotyping . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Delicious    Digg    Facebook    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?