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Recent changes in the numbers and types of lymphomas affecting the skin
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
british journal of dermatology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.304
H-Index - 179
eISSN - 1365-2133
pISSN - 0007-0963
DOI - 10.1111/bjd.20110
Subject(s) - citation , lymphoma , medicine , dermatology , pathology , world wide web , computer science
Linked Article: Dobos et al. Br J Dermatol 2021; 184 :1059–1067. Lymphomas are cancers of the immune cells, the lymphocytes. These often involve the lymph nodes. However, some lymphomas are first seen in the skin and they are classified according to the type of lymphocyte, into T‐ and B‐cell lymphomas, respectively. Yet little is known about the different types of skin lymphomas seen in populations or whether this pattern of different types changes over time. This study was carried out with the help of the French national lymphoma registry that records information about patients with lymphomas for the whole country. The lymphomas of the skin studied in this publication were those diagnosed between the years of 2005 and 2019 Cutaneous lymphomas are rare diseases and occur in more than one person per 100,000 person years; this is a measurement that takes into account the number of people in a study and the amount of time that they remain in the study. It was found that during the years covered in this study there was an increase in case numbers every year. These lymphomas were also commoner in men than women and in those over the age of 60. The numbers of the commonest form of T‐cell lymphoma, known as mycosis fungoides, remained stable over the study period and most of these patients presented early in the course of their lymphoma. However, the numbers of the more recently described T‐cell lymphoma variants, such as folliculotropic mycosis fungoides, or B‐cell lymphoma variants such as primary cutaneous marginal‐zone B‐cell lymphoma, increased over this time. The investigators suggest that these results can largely be explained by changes in the way in which lymphomas are classified. So the increases in numbers of cases of the newly described variants is simply because they were not recognized as distinct before and would have been recorded as mycosis fungoides or cutaneous B‐cell lymphomas. However, this does not detract from the main message coming from this study that the frequency of lymphomas of the skin has been increasing over the past 15 years.