Safety of measles vaccination to the patients with down syndrome on the chromosomal level.

Abstract

The patients with Down syndrome (DS) have been suspected of having some kinds of defects in their immune system (Levin et al. 1979) . Moreover, there have been only a few data on the effect of vaccination on them (Knuutila et al. 1979) . Therefore, the DS patients have been apt to be kept vaccinations off so far. But the vaccination to them should be needed more, since they show a tendency to be severer than normal children when they suffer from infectious diseases, if no particular evil occurs.Materials and methods. Donors: Fourteen children with DS (9 males and 5 females) with typical 21 trisomy karyotype and 7 karyotipically normal children (4 males and 3 females) as controls were studied. They were vaccinated with measles vaccine (Schwarz strain, Takeda), which was the first sensitization to measles for all of them. The averages of their age were 2 years and 5 months old in the DS patients, while 1 year and 7 months old in the controls. The ages of donors differed a little between the 2 groups because of the difficulty of sampling. Blood sampling was done just before vaccination and from 2 to 9 weeks after vaccination, in order to compare the results with those of wild infection (Higurashi et al. 1973).Cell culture: Lymphocyte cultures were set up with heparinized blood in RPMI-1640 (GIBCO) with 10% of FCS (GIBCO), 2 pg/ml of phytohemagglutinin A-M (GIBCO) and 10 pg/ml of 5-Bromodeoxyuridine (SIGMA) in final concentrations.They were incubated for 72 hrs at 37°C in 5 % C O2 atmosphere in the dark. Two hours prior to harvest, 0.2 pg/ml of colcemid (GIBCO) in final concentration was added.Slide preparation and analysis : The cells were collected by