The New England journal of medicine
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We investigated the growth of skin fibroblasts in tissue culture from 10 patients with Huntington's disease and eight healthy, unrelated controls. The patients' ages ranged from 34 to 56 years (mean 48.5), and the mean duration of their clinical illness was 12.4 years. The controls' ages ranged from 32 to 64 years (mean, 42.3). ⋯ This contradicts the finding of earlier investigators that skin fibroblasts from patients with Huntington's disease grow poorly in tissue culture. Matched pairs of Huntington's disease and control cultures grew at the same rate, but Huntington's disease cells grew to a significantly higher maximal density (P less than 0.02). This may indicate a genetically determined change in the cell surface or metabolic difference in Huntington's disease.
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Mononuclear peripheral blood leukocytes from 21 patients with infectious mononucleosis and 16 healthy controls were tested in a 51Cr-release assay for cytotoxicity against two human lymphoblastoid cell lines derived from the same donor. One line contained the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV); the other did not. Acute-phase leukocytes were significantly more cytotoxic against the EBV-infected cell line than were control leukocytes. ⋯ Cells of three patients with acute mononucleosis-like illnesses failed to show killing activity above those of normal controls. Cytotoxicity against the EBV-negative line was not significantly different for each group. The finding of cytotoxic cells in infectious-mononucleosis patients with atypical lymphocytes suggests that these cells operate in vivo to limit the proliferation of altered EBV-transformed B lymphoblasts.