The natural history of nodular lymphoma

The clinical and histopathologic characteristics of 65 patients with nodular lymphoma seen at the Massachusetts General Hospital between 1962 and 1972 were reviewed. Five years after diagnosis 54% of these patients were alive, but only 18 percent remained free of disease. Younger patients fared much better (64 percent of those below the age of 50 survived 5 years) than the elderly (only 34 percent of those above the age of 50 survived this long), but histologic subtype by the Rappaport classification was not useful in predicting survival in this series. Individuals with localized disease (80% of those in Stages I and II survived 5 years) experienced better survival than those with dissemination (only 45% of those in Stages III and IV lived this long), but the high relapse rate in Stages I and II indicates that few who presented with localized disease are cured. At the time of death, the histologic pattern had become diffuse in 8 of 18 patients but remained nodular in the other 10. Ten patients treated by total nodal irradiation followed the same survival curve as the remainder treated less radically. It is concluded that nodular lymphoma is an indolent but usually fatal entity: though more than half of our patients survived 5 years, few were cured by the treatments employed.