[Diagnosis and therapy of plasmacytoma and Waldenstrom's disease]

Plasmocytoma and Waldenstroem's disease together with some other very rare diseases form the group of paraproteinaemic haemoblastoses. In these cases the plasmocytoma as a neoplasia of the plasma cells is quite likely to define by the sum of the cytomorphological, radiological and immunological findings in form of the plasmocytosis of the bone-marrow, the destructions of the skeleton and the formation of monoclonal immunoglobulins as cardinal symptoms. Waldenstroem's disease, however, becomes more and more a special form of the IgM-forming malignant lymphomas. In its classical expression apart from the formation of lymphomas, hepato-splenomegaly and haemorhages it above all exhibits the excessive formation of a monoclonal, macromolecular immunoglobulin. In this disease the prognosis is in many cases by far more favourable than that one of the plasmocytoma which, apart from its solitary-multiple form of the course, is a disease with high malignity. Cyclophosphamide and sarcolysin are the remedies of choice in the plasmocytoma, procarbazine in waldenstroem's disease. Nowadays, the inclusion of the two diseases into the large spectre of neoplasias of all cells of the immuno-competent system which finally are structurally derived from the immunocyte and are functionally differentiated renders a special way of description unnecessary.