Characteristics of Peripheral Lymphocyte Subset Alteration in COVID-19 Pneumonia

By Fan Wang, Jia-yan Nie, Haizhou Wang, Qiu Zhao, Y. Xiong, Liping Deng, Shi-hui Song, Zhiyong Ma, Pingzheng Mo, Yongxi Zhang. Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2020

1,041 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Background In December 2019, novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pneumonia (COVID-19) was reported in Wuhan and has since rapidly spread throughout China. We aimed to clarify the characteristics and clinical significance of peripheral lymphocyte subset alteration in COVID-19. Methods The levels of peripheral lymphocyte subsets were measured by flow cytometry in 60 hospitalized COVID-19 patients before and after treatment, and their association with clinical characteristics and treatment efficacy was analyzed. Results Total lymphocytes, CD4+ T cells, CD8+ T cells, B cells, and natural killer (NK) cells decreased in COVID-19 patients, and severe cases had a lower level than mild cases. The subsets showed a significant association with inflammatory status in COVID-19, especially CD8+ T cells and CD4+/CD8+ ratio. After treatment, 37 patients (67%) showed clinical response, with an increase in CD8+ T cells and B cells. No significant change in any subset was detected in nonresponsive cases. In multivariate analysis, posttreatment decrease in CD8+ T cells and B cells and increase in CD4+/CD8+ ratio were indicated as independent predictors of poor efficacy. Conclusions Peripheral lymphocyte subset alteration was associated with clinical characteristics and treatment efficacy of COVID-19. CD8+ T cells tended to be an independent predictor for COVID-19 severity and treatment efficacy.

Subfields: Immunology, Infectious Diseases, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/680dd7fcf21cd1be673ee1c613fe9be3ba19b57f

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Citations in the corpus

• Should we stimulate or suppress immune responses in COVID-19? Cytokine and anti-cytokine interventions (2020, neutral): “have shown that all subsets of lymphocytes were decreased, including CD4+ and CD8+ cytotoxic T cells [57,60], natural killer (NK) cells, memory and regulatory T cells [61] along with B cells [62].”
• Biomarkers associated with COVID-19 disease progression (2020, background): “Lower CD8þ T cells count tended to be an independent predictor for COVID-19 severity and treatment efficacy [29].”
• Longitudinal characteristics of lymphocyte responses and cytokine profiles in the peripheral blood of SARS-CoV-2 infected patients (2020, background): “The severity of pathological injury during SARS or MERS correlates with the extensive infiltration of neutrophils in the lung and increased neutrophil numbers in the peripheral blood [19] .”
• Immunology of COVID-19: Current State of the Science (2020, neutral): “…(He et al., 2005), several current reports emphasize the occurrence of lymphopenia with drastically reduced numbers of both CD4 and CD8 T cells in moderate and severe COVID-19 cases (Figure 3) (Chen et al., 2020c; Nie et al., 2020b; Wang et al., 2020d; Zeng et al., 2020; Zheng et al., 2020b).”