To ascertain influences of cancer treatments on cellular immunity and also to study whether cellular immunoreactivity has a relation with lymph node metastasis or T stage, parameters such as lymphocyte subset proportions, T cell blastogenesis and nonspecific cytotoxicities were investigated on peripheral blood from 70 patients with head and neck carcinoma.
Originally, blastogenesis and LAK activity were inferior compared to those in the healthy controls, however other parameters were within each normal range.T stage and lymph node metastasis did not bring any difference except for lowered blastogenesis in T3 and T4. After treatments, CD4+Leu8+ cells decreased, and proportions of CD8+Leu8+, CD16+CD57- and CD16-CD57+ cells contrarily increased.Further, blastogenesis in all T stages and LAK activity in advanced T stages were significantly suppressed by treatments while NK activity was scarcely suppressed.
The above changes were stronger in advanced tumor (T3 and T4) cases who received more induction therapies than early stage (Ti and T2) cases.These results indicate that lymph node metastasis does not bring any visible change of the usual immunologic parameters, and that T cells especially CD4+Leu8+ cells are very sensitive, and LAK activity is suppressed in the pathologic condition, however NK cells are resistant to cancer treatments.Moreover, bothCD16-CD57+andCD4+Leu8+ cell populations seem to be useful markers in detection of cellular immunosuppression associated with cancer treatments because the former increased having a correlation with tumor death and the latter decreased exhibiting a reverse correlation with the increase of the former.
