In one study which investigated the structural and immunological aspects of tonsils and adenoids of 105 children (54 males and 51 females, aged between 4 and 18 years) who were affected by chronic inflammatory hypertrophy of palatine tonsils and adenoids which had not responded to previous medical treatments and who underwent adenotonsillectomy because of recurrent inflammatory episodes with fever, it was demonstrated that deficit in the activa-tion of the immune system could be represented by the small quan-tity of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA)s for interleukin-2 (IL-2) and interleukin-4 (IL-4) detected in our population, suggesting a defective activation of Th1 and Th2 lymphocytes.