DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE ACTIVITIES OF MATURE GRANULOCYTES IN LEUKEMIC AND NORMAL BLOOD 1

Abstract

The abnormal appearance and number of granu-locytes in the various leukemias suggest that phagocytosis by granulocytes in all stages of ma-turity might be so disturbed that leukemic patients might become more susceptible to bacterial infec-tions than normal persons. Phagocytic activity among immature granulocytes is only slight but increases with maturity and becomes prominent among metamyelocytes and mature leukemic neu-trophils (1-4). It has not been established, how-ever, whether mature leukemic neutrophils are equal in phagocytic activity to normal mature neu-trophils. Such a comparison has been attempted by Hirschberg (5) who concluded that the ma-ture neutrophils in leukemic blood displayed less phagocytic activity than mature neutrophils in nor-mal blood. Her results are open to question, how-ever, because comparisons were made between phagocytic systems which were not uniform with respect to: 1) The number of phagocytes per unit volume; 2) quantity of opsonin; and 3) character of suspending menstruum. She also neglected to take into account the possible effect of antileukemic treatment on the phagocytic properties of leuko-cytes. In the present study, the activity of mature leu-kemic granulocytes was measured in two ways: 1) Suspensions of leukemic and suspensions of nor-mal leukocytes, containing approximately equal numbers of mature granulocytes, were inoculated with opsonized type II pneumococcus and the phagocytic activity of leukemic granulocytes was compared with that of normal granulocytes. 2) Heparinized leukemic blood was divided into two portions and the buffy coat removed from one to lower the count of mature neutrophils to normal