Relationship between Lymphocyte Size and Enzyme Activities in Two Morphological Variants of B-Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia

Abstract

The activities of the key glycolytic enzymes phosphofructokinase (PFK), pyruvate kinase (PK) and hexokinase in addition to adenosine deaminase, purine nucleoside phosphorylase (PNP) and lactate dehy-drogenase (LDH) have been measured in lymphocytes from 39 cases with B-chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (B-CLL). According to the percentage of circulating large non-granular atypical lymphocytes (AL) the B-CLL cases were classified as: typical ( < 10% of AL; 28 cases) and atypical (10-25% AL; 11 cases). In both groups the median lymphocyte volume (MLV) was assessed and correlated with the correspondent enzyme activities.The MLV of B-CLL lymphocytes was significantly (p < 0.001) decreased (149.9 ± 19.4 fl) as compared to normal B lymphocytes (175.1 + 14.5 fl) and it was significantly (p < 0.001) lower in typical B-CLL (141.8 ± 12.2 fl) than in atypical B-CLL (172.0 ± 17.2 fl). Furthermore, in patients with typical B-CLL, all enzyme activities when expressed as U/109 cells were, with the exception of PFK, significantly decreased compared to normal B lymphocytes. However, when the results were expressed as U/ml cells, only PK, PNP and LDH remained significantly low.These findings demonstrate that the determination of MLV in addition to morphology may be a useful tool to distinguish the two previously described morphological B-CLL variants (typical and atypical) and that these two different B-CLL groups are also distinguishable on the basis of three enzyme activities, PK, PNP and LDH which have been shown to be less dependent on cell size than the other enzymes, also studied here.

AI-Enhanced Blood Cell Recognition and Analysis: Advancing Traditional Microscopy with the Web-Based Platform IKOSA

“…Routine analyses use automated methods, such as flow cytometry or electronic cell counters, to gather a sufficient quantity and quality of measures but lack the structural and morphological assessment of blood cells. On the other hand, the morphological evaluation of leukocytes by a pathologist usually lacks quantitative numerical values that are feasibly unattainable by human means [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21].…”

“…It seems evident that multidimensional quantifications of cellular morphology bear a great potential for precision diagnostics [12,15,17,[50][51][52][53][54][55][56]. Up to now, quantitative morphological assessments of leukocytes have mainly focused on neutrophils and lymphocytes, the more abundant immune cell types [15,16,19,20,[57][58][59][60][61][62], while less common cells, like eosinophils, are hardly analyzed in these correlative analyses. The aim of our study was to assess all cell types of blood circulation and fill the gap between non-numerical/morphological techniques and numerical/non-morphological methods, such as flow cytometry, expanding the realm of AI blood cell identification from late to early diagnostics.…”