| Research Abstract |
Kikuchi's disease is the disease entity defined by histological findings, but the disease has characteristic clinical features such as occurrence of young and adolescence with preference of female, swelling of neck lymph nodes with tenderness, fever, leukopenia under 4000 /mm^3, occasional skin rashes and excellent prognosis. These clinical findings were similar during these investigated years, but male ratio was slightly increased recently. Investigated disease specific proteins in serum and DNA in affected site could not detected yet. Histological findings were constant, but some recent cases showed pronounced foamy histiocytes with no obvious necrosis. Immunohistochemically myeloperioxidase was positive for proliferating CD4 positive cells, probably of plasmacytoid monocytes and the findings were very useful for cytological diagnosis of the disease by aspiration biopsy. The disease related obviously apoptotic process and both fas and fas ligands, and perforin granzyme pathways and the process strongly related to morphogenesis of the disease. Fas pathway related CXC chemokine, IP-10, monokine and Mig and perforin pathway related chemokine IL 18 also expressed in the affected foci. For the apoptotic process examined by gene chip, many apoptosis promoting chemokine concerning such CDC 6, CASP 2 and RIRK1 domain containing adaptor, caspase 6, BCL2 antagonist were up-regulated and apoptosis suppressed chemokine such as cyclin-dependent kinase 5, glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase, quiesin Q6 and BCL2-related myeloid cell leukemia sequence were down-regulated. From these findings Kikuchi's disease has very strong promoting process of apoptosis and it is very important to clear the inducible cause of this apoptotic process and also the disease is very useful for investigation of apoptotic process.
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