Association of depressed postoperative lymphoproliferative responses to alloantigens with poor prognosis in patients with stage I lung cancer.

Thirty-five patients with Stage I carcinoma of the lung were tested postoperatively to assess lympho-proliferative responses. Depressed lymphocyte proliferation (LP) responses to alloantigen in the mixed leukocyte culture (MLC) as measured by the relative proliferation index (RPI) were associated with a significantly shorter disease-free interval. In this group of patients, the immunologic responses predicted subsequent clinical course better than the TNM classification or the his-tological type of the tumor, and therefore this procedure appears promising for improved staging of patients with early stages of lung cancer (stage I lung cancer and T1N0M0). The depressed response to alloantigen was a more sensitive discriminator of disease recurrence than PHA alone or even combined with PHA.