Alternatively, autoimmune diseases may facilitate the acquisition of somatic mutations in lymphocytes.
Mutations in lymphocytes at the hypoxanthine phosphoribosyltransferase (hprt) gene locus have also been reported.
This attributes common ALL to mutations in lymphocytes rendered vulnerable through delayed exposure to infection in the first 2 years of life.
This proposed that ALL is caused by antigenically produced mutations in lymphocytes that had escaped the postulated differentiating effects of (non-specific) infections in the first 2 years of life, which would normally be protective (Greaves, 1988 ).
Four types of effects were originally reported in multiple studies: increased spontaneous abortion, shifts in red and white blood cell counts, increased somatic mutation rates in lymphocytes, and increased childhood, testicular, and other cancers.
In other cases, a protein- or DNA-bound metabolite, or an effect marker such as DNA mutation in blood lymphocytes, may be long-lived and represent previous exposure after the parent compound or metabolite can no longer be detected (Manjanatha et al. 1996).
Moreover, a decrease of Lamin B1 has been associated with a release of chromatin from LADs and increased frequency of mutations in specific lymphocytes populations, with consequences in lymphomagenesis29.
Three studies of BD-exposed workers in a Texas facility conducted by one laboratory indicated HPRT mutations in blood lymphocytes using the autoradiographic assay (Ammenheuser et al. 2001; Ward et al. 1994 , 1996 2001).
This observation is in line with previous findings showing that such somatic mutations occur often in lymphocytes, a process which is considered to be a major stochastic element in the pathogenesis of autoimmunity [10], [11].
