TIL: "B symptoms" are a weird term for symptoms used in lymphoma staging. They include intermittent fever, night sweats, and unintentional weight loss. If those are the 'B symptoms', what are the 'A symptoms'? you might reasonably ask. There aren't any! Or, more precisely, "A" indicates the lack of symptoms. So a stage IIA lymphoma is less severe than a stage IIB which presents with some or all of the symptoms listed above.
Say you want to check if a CT scanner malfunctioned during a scan or you're treating a nuclear power facility worker who was briefly exposed to a radioactive source. How could you tell if damage was done when outwardly these patients look and feel totally fine? Well, it turns out that the most sensitive cells to a massive full-body radiation exposure are leukocytes (T cells, B cells and natural killer cells of the immune system). So by doing a complete blood count (CBC) you can quickly see if these canaries in the proverbial coal mine have keeled over, indicating more serious systemic cell death to come.
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