Cabrera María Elena, Marinov Neda, Guerra Carolina, Morilla Ricardo, Matutes Estella
Departamento de Medicina, Campus Oriente, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Chile, Servicio de Medicina, Hospital del Salvador, Santiago.
Rev Med Chil. 2003 Mar;131(3):291-8.
Chronic lymphoproliferative disorders include a variety of diseases which are often a diagnostic problem for clinical hematologists.
To study prospectively the distribution and incidence of chronic lymphoproliferative disorders in Chile and compare them with those of other Western, Latin American and Oriental countries.
A group of 132 patients were studied in a 36 months period (1999-2001), with a panel of monoclonal antibodies. A score for chronic lymphocytic leukemia was employed to differentiate it from other B-cell disorders.
The median age was 63 years old (range 32-94). Most patients had B-cell tumors (109) and the rest (23), T-cell tumors (82% vs 18%). Forty five percent of patients with B-cell tumors had a chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), while the others were disseminated lymphomas. The incidence of T-cell tumors was slightly higher than that of other Western countries. Noteworthy is that the most common of these disorders was adult T cell leukemia/lymphoma (ATLL), in concordance with the high HTLV-1 seroprevalence in Chile.
A morphologic, immunophenotypic and pathological study in a large number of patients with chronic lymphoproliferative disorders in Chile, shows a relatively low incidence of CLL when compared to other chronic B-cell tumors and a high representation of ATLL associated to HTLV-1 infection, compared with other Western countries. The lower incidence of CLL in our study might be due to patient's selection and/or underdiagnosis of this disease as a substantial proportion of CLL are asymptomatic.
