Lymphocyte immunophenotype reference ranges in healthy Indian adults: implications for management of HIV/AIDS in India

With the advent and application of standard and sensitive flow cytometry methods, it became essential to establish reference intervals in healthy individuals to demarcate between health and disease. A reference range of lymphocyte populations for normal individuals is important in the diagnosis and prognosis of immunodeficiency diseases like AIDS. We tried to accomplish this by studying the values for T lymphocyte subsets for 200 healthy North Indian adults between 18 and 55 years. We obtained the following reference ranges for various T lymphocyte subsets: CD4 count (304–1864 cells/μl with the median of 666 cells/μl), CD4% (17.5–50.6% with the median of 35%), CD8% (14–53% with the median of 32.3%), CD3% (43–89% with the median of 70.5%), and CD4/CD8 ratio (0.04–3.5 with the median of 1.04). Significant variations were observed for normal reference intervals for T lymphocyte subsets according to the race, ethnic origin, age group, and gender.