Diagnosis of high risk lymphoma by molecular genotypic analysis: Bigenotype and multiple rearranged bands as risk factor.

Abstract

We examined 132 non-Hodgkin's lymphomas for rearrangements of TcR β and Ig genes. These histologic subclassification was based on the modified International Working Formulation (WF). Of these, 58 were derived from T-cell and 74 were from B-cell due to the results of immunophenotype. In high grade group of T-cell lymphomas, bigenotypic pattern with Cβ and JH probe was 14% and multiple rearranged bands pattern was 13%. On B-cell lymphomas, the bigenotypic pattern was 12% in high grade, 4.7% in intermediate grade and nothing in low grade. The multiband pattern was observed in only two cases (one is lymphoblastic subtype and the other one large). However, there is no corellation between the frequency of biphenotypic or multibands pattern, and WF subclassification in B-cell lymphoma. The presence of these specific rearrangement patterns in T-cell lymphoma (except for AILD) was associated with a poor prognosis. These findings indicate that the presence of bigenotypic and/or multibands pattern indentifies a high-risk group of patients with T-cell lymphoma.