Prognostic value of cytogenetic abnormalities in previously untreated patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma

In this study cytogenetic findings have been correlated with prognosis in 78 previously untreated patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) presenting between 1983 and 1988. The median follow-up was 7 years (range 2-9 years). There was no significant difference in the duration of survival of 33 patients with only abnormal karyotypes, 35 patients with a mixture of normal and abnormal karyotypes (AN) and 10 patients with only normal karyotypes (NN). This was true for the entire group (p = 0.6) as well as for the subsets of diffuse lymphomas (DL) and follicular lymphomas (FL) (p = 0.6 and 0.4, respectively). Monosomy 14 was the only abnormality in the entire group of patients to be associated with a statistically significant difference in survival duration (p = 0.046). Among the FL patients, trisomy 7 (p = 0.046) and trisomy 12 (p = 0.010) were associated with shorter survival. Presence of t(14;18) did not influence survival in the entire group (p = 0.16), nor in any of the histological subgroups. Among the FL patients with t(14;18), presence of additional cytogenetic abnormalities was not associated with a worse outcome. The lack of consistency of results between various studies is likely to be due to several factors and the prognostic significance of karyotypic abnormalities can only be clarified by large prospective studies employing uniform treatment policies.