Elevated high-density lipoprotein levels following acute graft-versus-host disease onset: a potential link to T-cell dysfunction and increased relapse risk

In this study, lipoprotein profiling* revealed that patients with acute graft-versus-host disease had elevated early post-transplant HDL levels, which were associated with delayed T-cell re-normalisation and increased effector-memory CD8⁺ T-cells, findings mirrored in vitro by HDL-induced reductions in healthy donor T-cell proliferation and activation, suggesting that high HDL may impair graft-versus-leukaemia efficacy through T-cell modulation and thereby increase relapse risk.