Letter to Editor

✍ Scribed by Paul H. Levine

• Book ID: 102276034
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1972
• Tongue: French
• Weight: 48 KB
• Volume: 10
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0020-7136
• DOI: 10.1002/ijc.2910100226

✦ Synopsis

Coldman criticized the paper by Johansson and his colleagues on chronic lymphocytic leukemia because

of the poor matching of the patients in regard to age. In Gur earlier study on chronic lymphocytic leukemia (Levine et al., A longitudinal comparison of antibodies to Epstein-Barr virus and clinical parameters in chronic Iymphocytic leukemia and chronic myelocytic leukemia, Blood, 38, 479-484, 1971 i t referred to in Dr. Johansson's paper, we demonstrated that 34 C L L patients with a mean age o f 63.5 showed significantly higher VCA titers (GMT = 1:444) than 24 normal controls with a mean age of 64 (GMT = 1:87), (p<O.OOI). Most of these patients were followed longitudinally for as many as 5 years and the VCA titers did remain constant during the course of the disease, thus answering one of the questions raised by Dr. Johansson in his letter.. It was apparent from this study that the high EBV titers were not a non-specific reflection of the elevated white counts in the C L L patients.