Table 4.

Evaluation of apoptosis in CD4⁺ cells after LAg and DT exposure

	% CD4+ apoptosis
Subjects	−	+	DT
Healthy	5·4	5·9	9·5*
Acute	9·8	15·3**	16·1**

Frozen PBMC from three VL patients, studied in acute and healed phases of disease (paired samples), were cultured for 24 h in medium alone (–) and in the presence of LAg (+) (2 × 10⁷ equivalent promastigotes) or DT (50 µg/ml). Afterwards, cells were treated with appropriate IS3-conjugated antibody (anti-CD4) and with Tdt-FITC staining. Data are expressed as mean percentage of increase in apoptosis of CD4⁺ in three patients. The variation of mean percentage of apoptosis in the two patients was less than 10%.

^*P < 0·05: significantly different from unstimulated or stimulated cultures with LAg.

^**P < 0·05: significantly different from unstimulated cultures.