Petridou Eleni, Klimentopoulou Alexandra E, Moustaki Maria, Kostrikis Leontios G, Hatzakis Angelos, Trichopoulos Dimitrios
Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, Athens University Medical School, Greece.
Int J Cancer. 2002 Sep 1;101(1):74-7. doi: 10.1002/ijc.10568.
The concentration of T-cell receptor rearrangement excision DNA circles (TRECs) in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) is currently known to be a marker of recent thymic emigrants. We evaluated the hypothesis that TREC values would be lower in childhood T-cell hematopoietic malignancies than in childhood B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) or healthy controls because the former category may reflect compromised thymic function. From the Greek national childhood leukemia/lymphoma database we obtained all 30 available T-cell leukemia/non-Hodgkin's lymphoma cases, 30 age- and sex-matched childhood B-cell origin cases of ALL and 60 healthy hospital controls. We compared TREC levels in PBMCs using a real-time PCR assay. There was highly significant reduction of TREC values in children with T-cell malignancies (median 3,100 TRECs/10(6) PBMCs), whereas children with B-cell origin ALL had slightly but nonsignificantly lower TREC values compared to healthy children (medians 19,300 and 22,500 TRECs/10(6) PBMCs, respectively). During a median follow-up period of about 19 months, only 4 children died. All of them had a T-cell hematopoietic malignancy and relatively low TREC values. The number of TRECs was higher among healthy girls than among healthy boys, and a similar pattern was evident in T-cell malignancies. It appears that there is a pattern of concordance of high TREC values with better disease prognosis in hematologic childhood malignancies. This applies to specific disease entities with better prognosis (B-cell origin ALL having higher TREC values than T-cell leukemia/lymphoma) and to gender, another important predictor of prognosis conditional on disease entity (girls having higher TREC values than boys); however, it may also be true for the survival of individual patients. These preliminary findings can be used as hypothesis-generating indications that should be confirmed in larger data sets.
目前已知外周血单个核细胞（PBMC）中T细胞受体重排切除DNA环（TREC）的浓度是近期胸腺迁出细胞的标志物。我们评估了这样一个假设：儿童T细胞造血恶性肿瘤患者的TREC值会低于儿童B细胞急性淋巴细胞白血病（ALL）患者或健康对照，因为前一类疾病可能反映胸腺功能受损。我们从希腊国家儿童白血病/淋巴瘤数据库中获取了所有30例可用的T细胞白血病/非霍奇金淋巴瘤病例、30例年龄和性别匹配的儿童B细胞起源ALL病例以及60例健康医院对照。我们使用实时PCR测定法比较了PBMC中的TREC水平。T细胞恶性肿瘤患儿的TREC值显著降低（中位数为3100个TREC/10⁶个PBMC），而B细胞起源ALL患儿的TREC值与健康儿童相比略低，但差异无统计学意义（中位数分别为19300和22500个TREC/10⁶个PBMC）。在约19个月的中位随访期内，只有4名儿童死亡。他们均患有T细胞造血恶性肿瘤且TREC值相对较低。健康女孩的TREC数量高于健康男孩，T细胞恶性肿瘤中也有类似模式。在儿童血液系统恶性肿瘤中，似乎TREC值高与疾病预后较好存在一致性模式。这适用于预后较好的特定疾病实体（B细胞起源ALL的TREC值高于T细胞白血病/淋巴瘤）以及性别，性别是基于疾病实体的另一个重要预后预测因素（女孩的TREC值高于男孩）；然而，这对于个体患者的生存情况可能也是如此。这些初步发现可作为产生假设的指标，应在更大的数据集中得到证实。
