Enumeration of lymphocyte subsets during follow-up in the pulmonary tuberculosis patients with co morbid diabetes mellitus.

The present study was designed to evaluate percentage of lymphocyte subsets in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of pulmonary tuberculosis patients with diabetes mellitus (TBDM) and household contacts (HHC) at the time of diagnosis and at different intervals of follow-up. T-lymphocyte subsets, monocytes and natural killer cells were evaluated using fluorescence associated cell sorting (FACS) in a total of 125 subjects including TBDM, pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) patients, HHC, diabetes mellitus (DM) patients and healthy controls (HC), 25 in each category. CD4 proportion was significantly low in TBDM (p = 0.