What is non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and what are the treatments?

What is non-Hodgkin lymphoma? What are the treatments?

All malignant lymphomas except Hodgkin's lymphoma are non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is not a simple disease as a whole. From the perspective of morphological and immunological characteristics, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is the result of monoclonal expansion. The dominant malignant cells in its composition can be derived from lymphocytes. The different stages of the entire differentiation process maintain extremely similar morphology, functional characteristics and migration forms of normal cells corresponding to their differentiation sites. This determines the wide differences in biology, histology, immunology, clinical manifestations and natural outcomes of different types of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Treatment options include:

1. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy should be performed after diagnosis. This is suitable for patients with large lesions, because large lesions are prone to recurrence after chemotherapy. Radiotherapy alone is not suitable for patients in stage II, while patients in stage I have a 40% recurrence rate. Therefore, it is not clear whether radiotherapy should be added to the combined chemotherapy regimen for patients in stages I and II. For patients in stages III and IV, intensive combined chemotherapy is mainly used.

2. Surgical treatment: The role of surgical treatment is more helpful in resecting lesions for a clear diagnosis. Surgical treatment is rarely used in the treatment of NHL.

3. Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. For patients who have failed conventional treatment or relapsed after remission, autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation should be considered. At present, it is advocated that autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation can be used as a first-line consolidation in some aggressive macromolecular tumors in order to obtain better disease-free survival and overall survival time. In a small number of patients, allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation can even be considered.