Systemic treatment for cutaneous lymphomas

Primary malignant T cell lymphomas of the skin form a heterogenous group. Relevant classifications were recently made to separate different entities by various criteria. This is of great importance, because one should only rely on those therapeutical trials in which patients were included according such classifications. In this paper, we will mainly focus on therapeutic modalities for mycosis fungoides, which is the most frequent cutaneous T cell lymphoma and which may serve as a model disease. In principle, local (e.g., psoralens and ultraviolet A, PUVA) and systemic therapies (e.g., interferon-alpha 2a) can be applied. Very recently, we were able to demonstrate that even in initial stages of mycosis fungoides, the T cell clone is not restricted to the skin, but rather is present in low amounts in the peripheral blood. Therefore, systemic therapeutic modalities alone or in combination with local strategies (interferon-alpha 2a and acitretin/PUVA and interferon-alpha 2a) should be more effective, which will be proven by currently running clinical trials.