Back to basics: Explaining lymphoma names
Many lymphomas have complicated names. How do they come by them?
A lot of the names are to do with what the lymphoma looks like down a microscope. Lymphoma is diagnosed by a pathologist from a biopsy and the lymph node has a very specific structure. The pathologist can identify whether the lymphoma is a B cell or T cell type using special stains.
If we take diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) as an example, the normal lymph node architecture is replaced by sheets of abnormal cells in an unstructured (or diffuse) way. The cells are larger than normal lymphocytes and special stains show they are B-cell. Hence diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.
The name follicular lymphoma was given because the normal lymph node structure consists of round structures called follicles (the name means ‘little bag’). But with follicular lymphoma the follicles are very big, expanded and crowded together.
Some are named after the person who identified them. For example Hodgkin lymphoma is named after the 19th century pathologist Thomas Hodgkin who first described the cases of lymphoma that took his name.
Burkitt lymphoma is named after Dennis Burkitt, an Irish surgeon who did a lot of work in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s and described children who had lymphomas of the jaw and the face.
Waldenström’s macroglobulinaemia is an example of the lymphoma being named after the person who recognised it as well as the biology of the disease. The Swedish doctor, Jan Waldenström, described people who had very thick blood. He realised the blood was thick because of large abnormal plasma proteins found in the blood called macroglobulins.
- You can find out more about the different types of lymphoma on our website lymphoma-action.org.uk/Types
With thanks to Professor Graham Collins, Haematology Consultant and Lymphoma Lead.
