Minimally Invasive Procedure for Accurate Diagnosis of Mucosa-associated Lymphoid Tissue Lymphoma of the Head and Neck

Flow cytometry significantly improves the diagnostic value of fine needle aspiration cytology of lymphoproliferative lesions of salivary glands

“…Several studies have described the utility of FC in conjunction with FNAC in the identification of malignant lymphocytes, 5-8 but only a few papers have also reported its use in salivary gland evaluation. 5,8,[25][26][27][28][29][30] Crapanzano et al, 28 reporting a series of six salivary gland samples, affirmed that FC is useful for diagnosis only in selected cases. Cha et al, 29 however, demonstrated that FC coupled with FNAC can be used as a minimally invasive means of early detection of MALT lymphoma.…”

“…Several studies have described the utility of FC in conjunction with FNAC in the identification of malignant lymphocytes, but only a few papers have also reported its use in salivary gland evaluation . Crapanzano et al ., reporting a series of six salivary gland samples, affirmed that FC is useful for diagnosis only in selected cases.…”

“…Cha et al, 29 however, demonstrated that FC coupled with FNAC can be used as a minimally invasive means of early detection of MALT lymphoma. Orita et al, 30 using a combination of cutting needle biopsy, FC and IgH gene rearrangement, detected a MALT lymphoma in a young patient having recurrent acute parotiditis, previously diagnosed as chronic inflammation by FNAC alone. The authors recommended this approach to avoid invasive procedures, such as open biopsy, particularly in young women or patients with poor performance status.…”

Extranodal Lymphoproliferative Processes and Flow Cytometry

“…FC has been occasionally reported in combination with FNA of the parotid and submandibular glands (table 1) [25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33]. In 2014 our group published a study in which FC was successfully applied in the distinction between reactive and lymphomatous processes of the salivary glands [34].…”

“…The literature that we are aware of that reports the use of FC is listed in table 2[29,30,31,32,33,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58]. Two papers were case reports [48,54]; some included thyroid specimens in studies performed to assess the overall value of FNA in NHL diagnosis [29,30,32].…”