Primary gastric T-cell lymphoma: A case report

Primary gastric T-cell lymphoma is a rarely encountered lesion causing difficulties in endoscopic biopsy diagnosis. We present a case of gastric T-cell lymphoma with its clinical presentation, pathological, and laboratory findings, and discuss the differential diagnoses, and the biology of these lymphomas. The patient was a 55 year old male presenting with abdominal pain and nausea. He had two negative gastric endoscopic biopsies but was operated based on the clinical, and radiological suspicion of gastric cancer. Pathological examination revealed a diffuse infiltration of the stomach wall with neoplastic lymphoid cells. Immunohistochemical studies revealed leukocyte common antigen (LCA), polyclonal T-cell marker (CD3), and focal human natural killer cell-like marker (NK-like) positivity of the tumor cells. The patient had regional lymph node involvement, therefore was staged as IIE (Ann Arbor). The patient died six months after the initial diagnosis. The case illustrates the difficulty in diagnosing these tumors by endoscopic superficial biopsies. [Turk J Cancer 2004;34(1):35-37]