Treatment of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) with R-CHOP(-like) regimens include large cumulative doses of prednisolone. In this retrospective study, we evaluated changes in vertebral bone density (VD) in DLBCL patients by measuring CT-ascertained Hounsfield units (HU) at the L3 level. In total, 111 patients diagnosed from 2007 to 2012 and response assessed following first line treatment were included. Post-treatment VD was significantly reduced to 86% of pretreatment VD on average (p < .001). Neither female sex nor high age (>70 years) were significantly associated with greater post-treatment VD reduction. Two years after completing R-CHOP treatment, VD remained significantly lower than baseline VD (p < .001). Vertebral compression fractures visualized by CT were found in 16/111 patients (14%) during follow-up. In conclusion, bone mineral density is significantly reduced following R-CHOP(-like) treatment and vertebral compression fractures are common. Glucocorticoid-induced osteoporosis may therefore have impact on survivorship for the large fraction of DLBCL patients with durable remissions.

BackgroundDozens of omics based cancer classification systems have been introduced with prognostic, diagnostic, and predictive capabilities. However, they often employ complex algorithms and are only applicable on whole cohorts of patients, making them difficult to apply in a personalized clinical setting.ResultsThis prompted us to create hemaClass.org, an online web application providing an easy interface to one-by-one RMA normalization of microarrays and subsequent risk classifications of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) into cell-of-origin and chemotherapeutic sensitivity classes. Classification results for one-by-one array pre-processing with and without a laboratory specific RMA reference dataset were compared to cohort based classifiers in 4 publicly available datasets. Classifications showed high agreement between one-by-one and whole cohort pre-processsed data when a laboratory specific reference set was supplied. The website is essentially the -package hemaClass accompanied by a Shiny web application. The well-documented package can be used to run the website locally or to use the developed methods programmatically.ConclusionsThe website and -package is relevant for biological and clinical lymphoma researchers using affymetrix U-133 Plus 2 arrays, as it provides reliable and swift methods for calculation of disease subclasses. The proposed one-by-one pre-processing method is relevant for all researchers using microarrays.

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