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PET/CT in primary mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma responding to rituximab-CHOP

Leukemia volume 30, pages 1799–1800 (2016)Cite this article

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Primary mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma (PMLBCL) is a distinct clinical and pathologic entity that constitutes 2–4% of the non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas in the USA.1 The young age of the patients and the scarcity of data for this disease make the study published from Vassilakopoulos et al.2 (January 2016 issue) very important.

The authors report that from the 147 patients with PMLBCL, 41 were excluded because of documentation of progression or stable disease. However, they do not provide details about the screening that was performed. As they mention in the first paragraph, computed tomography (CT) scan is not accurate enough because of initial disease bulk and fibrosis. Furthermore, they do not explain how the 106 patients were considered to be responding to rituximab-cyclophosphamide, hydroxydaunorubicin, oncovin, prednisone (R-CHOP). Were they evaluated with CT scans? How many weeks after the last immunochemotherapy? How many of them were in complete response/complete response unconfirmed (CR/CRu) or partial response (PR) according to the standard criteria?3 Were patients with less than a PR included in the analysis because of the potential interference of fibrosis or were they incorporated into the subgroup that was excluded? It would be very important to have the results of the evaluation with the CT scan prior to the positron emission tomography (PET)/CT, to explore if PET/CT positivity correlates to the amount of shrinkage in the sum of the products of the greatest diameters.

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  1. Department of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    K Lontos

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Lontos, K. PET/CT in primary mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma responding to rituximab-CHOP. Leukemia 30, 1799–1800 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/leu.2016.103

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