[Staging in non-Hodgkin's lymphomas]

In the period from 1970 to 1986, 46 patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma were laparotomized and splenectomized at the Surgery Division, University of Göttingen. The operation was frequently carried out in advanced or generalized stages with a therapeutic indication and served for purely diagnostic purposes in only a proportion of the cases. The Kiel classification was chosen for the histology. Accordingly, hairy-cell leukemia (14 cases) and chronic lymphatic leukemia (12 cases) were the most frequent diagnoses, followed by LP immunocytoma and centroblastic-centrocytic lymphoma (seven cases each). In four out of the 20 clinical pictures which were not already generalized by definition, i.e. in 20% of the cases, exploratory laparotomy resulted in a change of stage (comprising two improvements and two deteriorations). The spleen was affected in 41 out of the 46 patients; in addition, lymphomatous infiltrations were found in six of the 12 liver biopsies taken and in 15 out of 17 lymph node preparations taken. The average spleen weight in the NHL patients (1,623 g) was markedly higher than in a reference group of Hodgkin patients (317 g). With critical establishment of the indication, exploratory laparotomy with splenectomy in histologically verified NHL and lymphography in the clinical staging are the most precise methods of investigation in graduated diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's lymphomas.