Long-Term Follow-Up on Affinity Maturation and Memory B-Cell Generation in Patients with Common Variable Immunodeficiency

Common variable immunodeficiency (CVID) comprises a heterogeneous group of primary immunodeficiency disorders. Immunophenotyping of memory B cells at the time of diagnosis is increasingly used for the classification of patients into subgroups with different clinical prognoses. The EUROclass classification is a widely used method. Levels of somatic hypermutation (SHM) have proven useful as a prognostic marker for recurrent respiratory tract infections. As time of presentation and diagnosis is highly variable in CVID patients, and diagnostic delay is a common problem, it is important to know whether classification parameters are stable over time. The purpose of the study was to address this question in a cohort of 33 CVID patients followed from 3 to 19 years after diagnosis (average follow-up 8.8 years).

Levels of class-switched memory B cells were analyzed using flow cytometric immunophenotyping, and patients were classified according to the EUROclass criteria. Affinity maturation of B cells was measured using Igκ-REHMA, which assesses somatic hypermutation in kappa light chain transcripts. Clinical manifestations in terms of splenomegaly, autoimmune disease and granulomatous disease were also determined.

Switched memory B cells and levels of SHM were not consistently stable markers in a long-term follow-up setting. At a given time during follow-up, 60 % of the patients were assigned to the EUROclass group SmB- (less than 2 % switched memory B cells), but only 23 % were consistently assigned to this group. Associations between clinical manifestations and levels of switched memory B cells or SHM were not observed in our study.

Based on our findings, we suggest that immunologic characteristics in CVID patients should be evaluated several times after diagnosis using internationally standardized methods.