Whole blood culture for measuring mitogen induced T cell proliferation provides superior correlations with disease state and T cell phenotype in asymptomatic HIV-infected subjects.

Proliferative responses to a panel of mitogens were compared in parallel for two sources of cells, whole blood (WB) and conventionally prepared peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC), obtained from asymptomatic HIV seropositive and control subjects. Weak but statistically significant correlations of the proliferative responses were observed. Use of either lymphocyte source produced significant differences in the proliferative responses between the HIV seropositive and control subjects, but the use of WB was more powerful, with a smaller sample size being required to discriminate between the proliferative responses of the two study groups.