Nakagami, Yuya
Uchino, Kaori
Okada, Hiroaki
Suzuki, Kojiro
Enomoto, Megumi
Mizuno, Shohei
Yamamoto, Hidesuke
Hanamura, Ichiro
Nakayama, Takayuki
Tani, Hiroya
Takami, Akiyoshi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1822-9976
Funding for this research was provided by:
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports and Technology of Japan (#18K08343)
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare
Sysmex Corporation
Article History
Received: 10 May 2020
Revised: 15 June 2020
Accepted: 16 June 2020
First Online: 23 June 2020
Compliance with ethical standards
:
: The authors declare no conflicts of interest in association with the present study.
: We capitalized on the fact that Howell-Jolly bodies (HJBs) can be detected by routine clinical microscopy due to hyposplenism, as discovered by Dr. Dameshek, the founder of Blood, when 100 consecutive HJB-positive patients were analyzed, all of whom had underlying splenic diseases or a reduced splenic volume suggestive of functional hyposplenism, except for splenectomized cases. This study is this first to show that the HJB detection can easily and promptly screen patients with potential functional hyposplenism at risk of serious infections, and its usefulness should be recognized again.