Leukaemia cytogenetics / H. Jackson Woodliff.

  • Woodliff, H. Jackson.
Date:
1971
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Leukaemia cytogenetics / H. Jackson Woodliff. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Chapter X LYMPHOMAS Introduction The lymphomas are localized neoplastic disorders of the lym¬ phoid tissues which are histologically divided into several groups, such as follicular lymphoma, lymphosarcoma, Burkitt's lymphoma, reticulum cell sarcoma and Hodgkin's disease. In most, the disease is confined to the lymph nodes or lymphoid tissues, especially in the early stages; bone marrow is not infrequently involved but only occasionally are circulating tumour cells present in the blood. Peripheral blood cultures are therefore only occasionally of value in the investigation of karyotypes of lymphoma cells; bone marrow studies may be more rewarding but preferably lymphoid tissues should be sampled. A further reason for this is that the diseases starts in the lymphoid tissues; bone marrow and blood infiltration may occur later and by then secondary cytogenetic changes may have occurred. Diagnosis Chromosome studies of the peripheral blood cultures of most patients have been reported as being normal and the failure to find any abnormality is therefore of no value in diagnosis (Jacobs et al., Ì963b; Tjio et al., 1963), An increase in random aneuploidy has been present in some cases recorded in the literature and this was found to be significantly increased in our series (Hayhoe and Hammouda, 1965; Woodliflf, \969b). The value of this finding would lie in its presence in most of the malignant lymphomas and its absence in reactive lymphadenopathies, a proposition which has yet to be tested. Marker chromosomes and abnormal cell lines have been found in blood in some cases, probably due to the presence of circulating lymphoma cells (Hayhoe and Ham¬ mouda, 1965; Sinks and Clein, 1966), Although of considerable interest, these findings are of little diagnostic value because the abnormal cells can be recognized morphologically without recourse to cytogenetic analysis.