Abstract
With effective anti-viral therapy increasing numbers of infants are surviving neonatal herpes simplex virus infections. Some survivors have recurrent HSV skin lesions, suggesting a relative deficiency of their HSV-specific immunity. To test this we used limiting dilution assays to determine the frequency of HSV specific T lymphocytes in the blood of healthy children and adults and survivors of neonatal HSV encephalitis. The subjects' serum IgG and IgM anti-HSV antibodies were determined independently by ELISA. 30% of randomly selected children aged 18 months - 12 years had HSV antibody and all of these had HSV-responsive lymphocytes in the blood with a frequency of 1:7,000 to 1:15,000. 80% of healthy adults were antibody positive and their responder lymphocyte frequencies were 1:10,000 to 1:20,000. Responder cell frequencies in antibody negative children or adults were 1:200,000 or less. The neonatal HSV survivors were aged 6 months - 7 years. All had IgG and IgM HSV antibodies but their T cell responder frequencies were 1:30,000 or less. Monocyte defects and antigen-specific immunosuppression were excluded as explanations for the low responder cell frequencies by in vitro cultures. These results suggest that the survivors of neonatal HSV may, like the survivors of congenital or neonatal CMV, have a deficiency of HSV specific T4+ cells due presumably to central failure of production or to lack of clonal expansion.
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Hayward, A., Levin, M. & Groothuis, J. DEFECTIVE HSV-SPECIFIC IMMUNITY FOLLOWING NEONATAL HSV ENCEPHALITIS. Pediatr Res 18 (Suppl 4), 256 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-198404001-00979
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-198404001-00979