Hypodiploid Hemopoietic Precursors in Myelodysplastic Syndromes

To the Editor: Clark and coworkers report on the poor survival of patients with myelodysplastic syndromes presenting with a hypodiploid DNA stem line (June 5 issue).¹ We would like to take issue with several of the authors' results and conclusions. First, the authors defined the DNA index of bone marrow samples in relation to chicken and trout nucleated red cells, when a special convention on nomenclature for DNA ploidy strongly calls for separability of aneuploid and normal diploid G_1/0 cell populations.² The authors seem to have encountered only uniform populations of marrow cells showing various degrees of staining differences.