immunophenotypic characterization of the leukemic b-cells from iranian patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia: association between cd38 expression and disease progression

background: patients with b-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia (b-cll) have hetero-geneous clinical courses, thus several biological parameters need to be added to the cur-rent clinical staging systems to predict disease outcome. recent immunophenotypic stud-ies performed mainly in western populations have demonstrated the prognostic value of cd38 and zap-70 expression in b-cll. objectives: to investigate the expression pat-tern of a variety of membrane antigens on leukemic cells from iranian patients with cll and to find out if there are any differences in the expression of these markers between in-dolent and progressive groups. methods: in the present study, peripheral blood samples from 87 iranian patients with b-cll were analysed by flow cytometry. results: in all cases, the neoplastic cells displayed b-cll phenotype (cd5+/cd19+/sig+). the vast ma-jority of the cases expressed cd23, but failed to stain for cd3 or cd14. the leukemic cells of most patients expressed cd27 (84/87, 95.4%) and cd45ro (74/87, 83.9%) molecules, suggesting a memory b-cell phenotype. comparison between the indolent (n=42) and progressive (n=37) patients revealed significantly higher frequency and inten-sity of cd38 expression in progressive group (40.5%) compared to indolent (11.9%) pa-tients (p