Absent pleocytosis in infant viral central nervous system infections reflects lymphocyte depletion and cytokine activation
Clare Mills, Holly Drummond, Helen E. Groves, Etimbuk Umana, Thomas Waterfield · 2026
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Description
Clare Mills and co-authors studied febrile babies whose spinal fluid carried virus but, puzzlingly, no rise in white blood cells. Their 2026 study uses a prospective multicenter cohort of young infants checked for meningitis, where enterovirus and parechovirus are frequent finds.
A missing cell rise, called absent pleocytosis, is often blamed on early testing or an immature immune system. Blood protein profiling told a sharper story: infants without the cell rise showed signs of lymphocyte depletion alongside switched-on cytokine signals. In other words, the flat spinal fluid reflected a real biological state in the blood, not a timing artifact or a stray virus.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Clare Mills, Holly Drummond, Helen E. Groves, Etimbuk Umana, Thomas Waterfield |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 62540 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |