Flow Cytometry-Based Detection Of B-Cell Lymphoproliferative Disorders In Patients With Mycosis Fungoides

Patients with cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (CTCL) have an increased risk for developing second malignancies (1-3). In both population-based and clinic-based data, a significantly increased risk of developing a second primary lymphoma (Hodgkin disease or non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL)) was observed in patients with mycosis fungoides (MF) or Sezary syndrome (SS) (4). The contemporaneous occurrence of MF and B-cell malignancy supports the con-cept that an association exists between the 2 diseases, and it has been suggested that having either disease may pre-dispose a patient to the other (5, 6). Chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) is a low-grade lymphoproliferative ma-lignancy with clonal expansion of B cells that is included in the NHL family. A large population-based study recently investigated the incidence of CTCL in patients with NHL and CLL and found a greater risk of CTCL in men with CLL and in both men and women with NHL than in the general population (7). We report here 4 cases of B-cell lympho proliferative disorders that were detected by flow cytometry analysis during the staging of discordant MF.