Figure 3.

Correlation between the concentration of neutrophils in the peripheral blood and arthritis development. The mice were intravenously injected with RB6-8C5 mAb (150 µg/0·4 ml/body) or isotype mAb on day 0. Peripheral blood was collected from the untreated mice (black bar) on day 0 before mAb injection, and was thereafter collected everyday from day 1 to day 5 from the RB6-8C5 mAb-injected (open bar) or the isotype mAb-treated mice (gray bar), and the concentration of neutrophils in the blood was counted (a). The five mice in each group were killed at each time point to obtain the blood. The concentrations of peripheral blood neutrophils in the RB6-8C5 mAb-injected mice were significantly different from those of the isotype mAb-injected mice (*P < 0·001). The mice were injected with anti-CII mAb on day 0, RB6-8C5 mAb (▴) or isotype mAb (○) on day 2 (arrow), and with LPS on day 7 (arrowhead) (b). The severity of the arthritis was judged using the sum of arthritis scores of both fore and hind paws, as described in Materials and methods. The sum scores (maximum score: 12) were expressed as the mean ± SEM of the five mice in each group.