Immune complexes in peripheral blood polymorphonuclear leucocytes of malignant melanoma patients

Immune complexes in PMN cells of sixty-five patients with malignant melanoma were studied by scoring the cells for IgG and complement inclusions. Group (a), consisting of thirty-four patients free from tumour after surgical therapy, showed a median IgG score of 17, which was not statistically different from the control group (n = 11), with a median score of 10. However, the tumour-bearing group (b) (n = 31) showed a significantly higher median score of 22. When group (a) was subidivided, it was shown that the patients who had an invasive growing melanoma with a bad prognosis (n = 11) showed a significantly higher median score of 25, while the patients who had a superficial melanoma with good prognosis were not different from the controls. After subdividing group (b), it was shown that patients with localized disease (n = 13) had a median score of 12, which not different from that of the controls. However, the patients with regional lymphnode involvement (n = 9) or distant metastases (n = 9) showed significantly higher median scores of 69 and 24 respectively. Six out of sixteen patients showed a significant drop in PMN inclusions after surgery. Complement scores gave similar patterns.