Occurrence of Non-Motile Leucocytes

Abstract

Sabin, Cunningham, Doan and Kindwall 1 observed that when supravital counts were made on blood drawn every 15 minutes there appeared “showers of non-motile cells” at approximately hourly intervals. They interpreted these as being due to degenerating polymorphs which were actually dying in the blood stream. Beard and Beard 2 confirmed the existence of these showers, and were able to increase their magnitude without altering their rhythm by the injection of sodium citrate. More recent workers (Smith and McDowell, 3 Jones, Stephens, Todd, and Lawrence 4 ) have been unable to confirm these observations, and find that the non-motile cells occur at irregular intervals and are probably artefacts.

If the non-motile cells are really dying polymorphs, most of them should be old cells, as determined by the criterion of the number of lobes in the nucleus (Cooke and Ponder 5 ), whereas if they are artefacts, we might well expect both young and old cells to be affected, i. e., cells of all the classes of the polynuclear count. I have made a series of counts to determine (a) whether the non-motile cells occur regularly, and (b) whether they are always old cells, i. e., cells of the higher classes of the polynuclear count. For each count 2 preparations were made under separate coverslips but on the same slide, and these were examined by the supravital technique, counts of non-motile cells being made in regions of the preparations which initially showed many motile forms. Table I shows a typical series of results. The preparation designated by (a) was the one counted first.