Circulating CD4+CD161+CD196+ Th17 cells are not increased in immune thrombocytopenia

val 3-5 months).Among the 176 patients with MK we first considered the number of normal cells and, then separately, the number of abnormal cells.A univariate proportional hazards model indicated that survival improved as the number of normal cells increased (hazard ratio 0.95, 95% CI 0.9-0.99,P=0.02).The presence of 5 or more normal cells was associated with an HR of 0.76.The number of normal cells remained prognostic after accounting for age, gender, and treatment.In the multivariate model, older age was the only other factor associated with shorter survival.In contrast, the number of abnormal cells was not associated with survival in either univariate or multivariate analyses.To jointly examine the number of normal cells and the number of abnormal cells we calculated the percentage of normal cells (which equals 1-percentage of abnormal cells).A higher percent of normal cells was associated with longer survival (hazard ratio 0.99, 95% CI 0.98-1.0,P=0.02) in both a univariate model and a multivariate model controlling for therapy, age, gender, WBC count, and blood blast percentage (Table 1).How residual normal metaphases translate into longer survival is unclear.Despite the statistically significant findings, the survival of even those MK patients with residual normal cells is very poor (Figure 1).While the medical significance of our findings in MK patients is thus limited, our observations suggest that it might be worthwhile to examine the prognostic effect of residual normal metaphases in patients with better prognosis karyotypes.More generally, our results provide further evidence for the heterogeneity of even well defined cytogenetic groups.