Some cytological aspects of bronchial asthma

We report the correlation between blood eosinophilia obtained by chamber count, percent in peripheral blood and the resulting value of this percent by the total number of leukocytes, together with the nasal and sputum eosinophilia and basophils in blood, in 57 asthmatic patients. Seventeen of them were on treatment with systemic steroids. We found blood eosinophilia in 24 patients (42%), being the chamber count method the most reliable. There was a significant difference in blood eosinophils between symptomatic and asymptomatic patients (p less than 0.05) without systemic steroid treatment. We did not find correlation between eosinophilia and the type of asthma (intrinsic-extrinsic). Only 5 out of 40 patients had eosinophilia on nasal smear, all with rhinitic symptoms. We studied sputum eosinophils in 40 out of 57 patients. Thirty (75%) had eosinophilia while only 45% of them had blood eosinophilia. Neither did we find correlation between blood and sputum eosinophilia (p greater than 0.05). We also encountered basophilia in 11 patients (19.2%). The number of basophils was inferior in asymptomatic patients treated with systemic steroids than in asymptomatic without systemic steroid treatment. Any relation between number of basophils, kind of asthma or clinical status was not observed. We did not find correlation between number of basophils and eosinophils in blood (r = 0.24; p greater than 0.05).