Hodgkin's lymphoma -- prognosis as related to histology, clinical stage and treatment

The rapid advances in modern chemotherapy and actinotherapy of Hodgkin's lymphoma and an improvement in its diagnosis have ushered in numerous novel procedures. This is a preliminary analysis of the results of treatment of 117 patients with actinotherapy, polychemotherapy, consisting of a chemotherapeutic four-combination as substitution for MOPP and a combined actino-chemotherapy. Actinotherapy was found more efficient in localized disorders of stages I and II, while polychemotherapy proved the more suitable when the disease was generalized -- stages III and IV. The analysis of our results has brought only partial support to the prognostic significance of the histological classification of Hodgkin's lymphoma according to Rye. No difference of statistical significance has been noted between the histological types of lymphocyte dominance, nodular sclerosis and mixed cellularity. Lymphocyte depletion alone showed a conspicuously worse prognosis than the other histological types.