Distribution of lymphocyte subpopulations in patients with polycythemia vera

Abstract Polycythemia vera (PV) is a disease with slow development. Nonetheless, the immune response is unable to eliminate the uncontrolled proliferating hematopoietic cells, leading to treatment of patient by phlebotomy and/or cytotoxic drugs. In addition, a higher incidence of cancers is observed in PV patients, independently of treatment. These observations argue for an impaired immune response in PV. In order to investigate this hypothesis, we studied the distribution of lymphocyte subpopulations in PV, and showed a significant decrease in T, TCR γ/δ and B cells together with an increase in natural killer (NK) cells.