Low Paneth cell numbers at onset of gastrointestinal graft-versus-host disease identify patients at high risk for nonrelapse mortality.

ABSTRACT: Acute graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract is an often lethal complication of allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplant. Clinical severity correlates with outcomes, but histopathologic grading is primarily used to confirm the clinical diagnosis. One barrier to using histopathologic grading to predict clinical outcomes is inter-grader variability among transplant centers. Recent experimental models have shown that the loss of Paneth cells, which are located in the small intestine and help regulate the GI microbiome by secreting antimicrobial peptides, correlates with clinical GVHD severity. Because Paneth cells are easy to identify and quantify by light microscopy, we evaluated the mean number of Paneth cells per high-powered field (hpf) in 116 duodenal biopsie

SUBMITTER: Levine JE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3750343 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature