A prospective study of 728 cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma from a single laboratory in Shanghai, China

Abstract

The frequency of subtypes of lymphoid neoplasms was determined in a prospective series of 831 patients presenting at 29 Shanghai hospitals over a 4-year period. Diagnosis and classification was established in a single laboratory according to the 2001 WHO classification system. The frequency of non-Hodgkin lymphoma was 87.6% (n = 728) and Hodgkin lymphoma was 12.4% (n = 103). The most prevalent NHL subtypes diagnosed using WHO criteria were diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL), precursor B lymphoblastic leukemia/lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia/small lymphocytic lymphoma (CLL/SLL). Although a low incidence has been reported in some Asian populations, CLL/SLL was commonly encountered, indicating that chronic lymphoid neoplasms are not rare in Shanghai. Consistent with previous reports, our findings indicate a decrease in the frequency of follicular lymphoma and an increase in T cell neoplasms compared to the West. Precursor T lymphoblastic leukemia/lymphoma, anaplastic large T cell lymphoma, aggressive NK cell leukemia, angioimmunoblastic T cell lymphoma and peripheral T cell lymphoma were prominent subtypes of T cell NHL.

Distribution of lymphoid neoplasms in the Republic of Korea: Analysis of 5318 cases according to the World Health Organization classification

“…Our findings are in agreement with previous results, showing the relatively higher proportions of patients with overall NHL and T/NK-cell neoplasms, and the relatively lower proportions of patients with FL, CLL/SLL, and HL among Korean individuals compared with those of Western populations (Supplementary Table III) [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]19,21,23,37].…”

“…As for MALT lymphoma, the frequency observed in this study was similar to that of previous Korean data, and higher than the Japanese or USA data (Supplementary Table III) [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]19,21,23,37]. In agreement with previous findings, we found that the proportions of Korean patients with CLL/SLL and FL were low; this is in contrast to the increased rate of FL in Japan, where this subtype now accounts for 20% of all NHLs [12,22,27,45].…”

“…As for MCL, no remarkable difference was noted between countries. Among the mature T/NK-cell neoplasms, peripheral T-cell lymphoma and extranodal NK/T-cell lymphoma of nasal type exhibited similar proportions, as has been shown in other studies from East Asian countries, and these subtypes were much more common than those of Western countries (Supplementary Table III) [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]37,40]. We found that the proportion of patients with ALL/ABL (16.4% of total lymphoid neoplasms) was in agreement with the nationwide incidence ratio based on Korea National Cancer Incidence Database of the period 1999-2005 (Supplementary Table IV) [11], but was much higher than that in previous reports from Korea (3.4-5.5%) [19,21,23].…”

“…Our current knowledge of NHL subtype distribution in Asia is based primarily on studies of lymphomas, the solid phase, in adult populations [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][33][34][35][36][37][38]40,41]. Although these data effectively characterize the subtype spectrum of lymphomas [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35], most studies have excluded the majority of plasma cell neoplasms and leukemias (circulating phase).…”

Peripheral T cell lymphoma in Asia

“…The incidence and distribution of T-and NK-cell lymphomas in several Asian countries is summarized in Fig. 1 and Table 1 [ [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15].The frequencies of T-and NK-cell lymphomas seem to increase from West to East Asia. The occurrence rate of Tand NK-cell lymphomas are relatively low (\20 % of NHL) mainly in West Asia (Turkey 16.2 %, Iraq 19 %, and Kuwait 18 %) and South Asia (Pakistan 11.3 %, and India 20.2 %), but relatively high mainly in East Asia (China 32.5 %, Korea 22 %, and Japan 24.9 %) and Southeast Asia (Thailand 25 %).…”