Figure 5.
T-cell immunophenotype and cytokine secretion analyzed with flow cytometry. (a) The proportion of naïve CD8+ CD45RA+CD62L+ T cells in early-relapsing patients (20.6%, n=13), late-relapsing patients (18.9%, n=8) and non-relapsing patients (12.5%, n=17). (b) PD-1 expressing central memory CD4+ T cells (CCR7+CD45RA-) in early relapsing (16.5%, n=9), late relapsing (16.0%, n=8) and non-relapsing patients at baseline (21.7% (n=12). (a, b) Box-and-whisker plots present 5–95 percentiles. One-way ANOVA was used for comparison between multiple groups (exact P-value reported in the figure), and Bonferroni's post test was used to compare selected pairs (only early relapse group was compared with other groups to avoid multiple comparisons). Statistically significant differences between the groups are marked with asterisk (*P<0.05). (c) Correlation between TNF-α/IFN-γ secretion of CD4+ T cells with NK-cell proportion in non-relapsing patients at baseline. (d) Correlation between TNF-α/IFN-γ secretion of CD4+ T cells and NK-cell proportion in relapsing patients (early and late) at baseline. Correlations were analyzed with the non-parametric Spearman test.