Functional asplenia in patients with chronic graft-versus-host disease: concise communication.

Liver/spleen images were performed with technetium-99m sulfur colloid in 53 patients who had undergone bone-marrow transplantation. The spleen was not seen in the images in five out of the ten patients with chronic graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). None of the five had a history of splenectomy. In two of these patients, anatomical presence of the spleen had been documented earlier by scintigram. The spleen was visible in all seven patients with acute and in all 36 patients without GVHD. Neither the differences in methods of treating the patients before bone-marrow transplantation nor the time lapse between transplantation and the liver/spleen image correlated with the observed effect among these three groups of transplant patients. We conclude that there is a high association between chronic GVHD and functional asplenia.