Outline of a Prospective Multicentric Study on the Clinical Significance of the Kiel Classification of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphomas

Abstract

After the Kiel classification of non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas had been proposed [12, 20] a multicentric cooperative group of clinicians in Germany and Austria, the Kiel Lymphoma Group, has analyzed retrospectively the clinical features of 405 patients who had been diagnosed according to this histopathologic scheme [5, 6, 7, 31]. In these patients, staging evaluation had not been performed regularly, and treatment protocols were different in the various centers. As shown in Fig. 1, differences in the survival probabilities could be evidenced among the lymphomas of low-grade malignancy. In contrast, patients with the high-grade malignant immunoblastic and lymphoblastic lymphomas showed an almost identically poor prognosis. The data obtained from this analysis suggested the clinical relevance of the Kiel classification. Therefore, on October 1,1975 the Kiel Lymphoma Group initiated a prospective study which follows a single diagnostic and therapeutic protocol and has as its aim the further clarification of the clinical and prognostic features of the lymphoma entities diagnosed according to the Kiel classification.