Diagnostic, predictive and prognostic verification of DNA flow cytometric measurements performed at diagnosis for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma adult patients.

More than ten years ago we made first attempts at valuating a prognostic power of flow cytometric DNA measurement results for patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. In multivariate overall survival analysis, S-phase fraction (SPF) showed to be the only independent prognostic factor within the group of patients with low grade lymphomas. In this paper, we have tried to check our previous results in a greater group of patients with longer follow-up, within the specific types of B-cell and T/NK-cell lymphomas verified and classified according to criteria of the WHO 2008 classification. The study was performed on the material obtained from biopsies (85% of lymph nodes) of 484 NHL patients. Patients were diagnosed from 1991 to 2007. The medium follow-up time for living patients was 69 months (range: 25-202 months). All specimens were verified histologically and immunohistochemically. Ploidy and SPF were determined by flow cytometry on fresh tissue obtained during the diagnostic procedure. The diagnostic importance of ploidy and SPF has been confirmed. Ploidy had no predictive or prognostic impact in any of the NHL types, whereas SPF was found to be an independent predictive or prognostic factor in B-CLL/SLL, DLBCL and ALCL.