Absence of HTLV-I DNA sequences in cutaneous T-cell lymphoma/mycosis fungoides.

Recently, the presence of deleted forms of the HTLV-I provirus was described in 6 out of 6 cases of CTCL. We investigated whether the presence of these viral genomes could be verified in 20 patients with CTCL using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and Southern blot analysis. Only one of the 20 cases showed a band corresponding to the pX region of HTLV-I. These data indicate that in the majority of CTCL cases, sequences closely related to HTLV-I are not present, or their copy number is below the limit of detection employed in this study.