Disproportion of Helper T Cell Subsets in Peripheral Blood of Patients with Primary Sjogren's Syndrome

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Abstract
We studied the proportions of Thl and Th2 cells in peripheral blood of 15 patients with primary Sjögren's syndrome (p-SS), by using a procedure to enumerate the cells synthesizing cytokines such as INF-γ or 1L-4 in cytoplasm of CD4+ lymphocytes. The frequency of Thl (INF-y containing) cells in p-SS patients was significantly reduced as compared to normal control (20.57±7.48% vs 28.78 ± 11.56%, p<0.05), while that of Th2 (IL-4 containing) cells was not different from normal control (3.33 ±0.98% vs 2.85 ± 1.88%). The ratio of Thl to Th2 cells in p-SS patients was significantly decreased as compared to normal control (6.60 ± 3.15 vs 11.55 ft 6.72,p< 0.05). There was no difference in frequency of Thl or of Th2 cells between 8 patients given small amounts of prednisolone (PSL) and 7 patients not given PSL (21.44 ±9.39% vs 19.57 ±5.05%, 3.12 ±0.80% vs 3.56 ± 1.17%). The percentage of Thl cells was not different between 7 patients with glandular symptoms (G) and 8 patients with extraglandular symptoms (EG) (18.61 ±9.63% vs 22.27 ± 5.02%). Although the frequency of Th2 cells was higher in EG-patients than that in G-patients (3.84 ± 0.78% vs 2.74 ± 0.86%) with tendency of elevated IgG level in sera, the ratio of Thl to Th2 cells was not different among them (6.26 ± 2.84 vs 6.99 ± 3.64). These results suggest that the reduced ratio of Thl to Th2 cells is essential and is related to the dysfunction of cellular immunity in p-SS.