The hematotoxicity of benzene exposure has been well known for a century. Benzene causes leukocytopenia, thrombocytopenia, pancytopenia, etc. The clinical and hematologic picture of aplastic anemia resulting from benzene exposure is not different from classical aplastic anemia; in some cases, mild bilirubinemia, changes in osmotic fragility, increase in lactic dehydrogenase and fecal urobilinog...

Emerging evidence indicates that microRNA control and modulate immunity. MicroRNA have not been investigated in acquired aplastic anemia, a T-cell-mediated immune disease. Analysis of 84 microRNA expression levels in CD4(+) and CD8(+) T cells of patients with aplastic anemia revealed concurrent down-regulation of miR-126-3p, miR-145-5p, miR-223-3p, and miR-199a-5p (>3-fold change, P<0.05) in bo...

Aplastic anemia is an immune-mediated disorder in most cases. The suppression of hematopoiesis by CD8+ T cells and also the overproduction of interferon(IFN)-γ and tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α due to the Th1 response were demonstrated. Aplastic anemia patients with HLA-DRB1*1501 and oligoclonality of the T-cell repertoire in the peripheral blood showed immunosuppressive therapy (IST), cyclospo...

Anti-thymocyte globulin (ATG) provides effective therapy for many patients with aplastic anemia, and its mechanism of action has been presumed to be secondary to lymphocytotoxicity. However, our studies of lymphocyte function in aplastic anemia show marked abnormalities of lymphokine production, which ATG may modulate. In 12 of 17 patients with aplastic anemia, interleukin 2 (IL2) production wa...

Aplastic anemia is a fatal bone marrow disorder characterized by peripheral pancytopenia and marrow hypoplasia. The disease can be hereditary or acquired and develops at any stage of life. A subgroup of the inherited form is caused by replicative impairment of hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells due to very short telomeres as a result of mutations in telomerase and other telomere components...

I T IS VERY DIFFICULT to prove that an industrial or nonindustrial cxposure to a chemical has an etiologic relationship to the development of aplastic anemia, especially when there are very few reported instances of such a relationship. Such a situation has presented itself and we, therefore, feel obliged to report this association : the development of aplastic anemia after prolonged exposure t...

We report the case of a 37-year old man presenting with a left ventricular cardiac thrombus in the setting of subclinical paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinura (PNH) developing two years after immunosuppressive therapy for thymoma-associated aplastic anemia. The literature regarding the interplay between autoimmunity and immunosuppression, aplastic anemia, thymoma and the emergence of PNH is revie...

Acquired aplastic anemia is an idiopathic paradigm of human bone marrow failure syndrome, which involves active destruction of hematopoietic stem cells and progenitors by cytotoxic T cells in the bone marrow. Aberrant expression of microRNAs in T cells has been shown to lead to development of certain autoimmune diseases. In the present study, we performed a microarray analysis of miRNA expressi...