[Ocular herpes. Correlations between subpopulations of T lymphocytes and clinical manifestations?]

Herpes simplex virus can affect the cornea in many ways, the main differences concerning the evolutive stage and the severity. Using the rosettes technique, we have tried to know if the study of the T lymphocytes subsets may give some help in foreseeing the risk of stromal or recurrent keratitis. Peripheral lymphocytes and T lymphocytes subsets: total E, E-active, autologous rosettes forming cells (E, E-act., auto-RFC) were studied among 60 patients with different clinical manifestations of herpetic keratitis: i.e. 27 epithelial and 23 stromal ones, 20 primary and 40 recurrent keratitis. Two groups of patients were found to have decreased levels of one T lymphocytes subset: the stromal ones with the most serious prognosis had above all a E-act--RFC decrease (16,5 +/- 8,5% vs 24,1 +/- 4,7 for the controls, p 0,001); the recurrent ones had above all a E-RFC decrease (53,6 +/- 6,4% vs 63,7 +/- 8,7 for the controls, p less than 0,001). So the most severe herpetic keratitis: recurrent and stromal ones seem to have cellular immunity abnormalities that are not found in the superficial or primary keratitis.