Hematologic and cytogenetic findings in myelodysplastic syndromes treated with recombinant human granulocyte colony-stimulating factor.

We administered recombinant human granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (rhG-CSF) to four patients with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and three patients with non-MDS (two malignant lymphoma and one lung cancer) as a part of a phase II trial and analyzed the effects of rhG-CSF on the neoplastic cells of MDS by performing sequential chromosome analyses on the bone marrow cells. A greater than 3-fold increase in neutrophil count was observed in the MDS patients after rhG-CSF infusions, whereas the number of blasts in the bone marrow did not increase and none of them progressed into the leukemic phase. After rhG-CSF treatment, the bone marrow cells obtained from patients without MDS did not show any particular chromosome abnormalities such as chromosomal breakage. On the contrary, two of the four MDS patients with acquired chromosome abnormalities showed a change in the frequency of marrow cells with clonal abnormalities after rhG-CSF treatment; the proportion of metaphase cells with additional numerical chromosome abnormalities decreased in these two MDS patients. After discontinuation of the treatment, the constitution of marrow cells with chromosome changes reverted to that before treatment. The remaining two MDS patients did not show any particular chromosome changes after the rhG-CSF treatment, indicating that rhG-CSF may not promote the characteristics of dyshematopoiesis in MDS, and act on cells derived from an MDS clone.