Morphometric study of bone marrow in chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

A morphometric study utilizing the point counting method was carried out on bone marrow biopsies of 44 patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) in order to correlate the objective volume of the lymphocytic infiltration with the histologic patterns (nodular, interstitial, mixed and diffuse) and the clinical stages (A, B and C). The prognostic significance of isolated lymphocytic tumor cell burden was also analyzed. The results suggest that there is a significant correlation between the amount of tumoral lymphoid tissue (VL greater than 60% versus VL less than 60%) and the interstitial and diffuse histologic patterns, as well as with the clinical stages A and C. However, the lymphoid burden did not correlate with the nodular and mixed patterns, nor with the clinical stage B. When patients with VL greater than 60% were compared with those with VL less than 60%, the difference in cumulative survival rates was not significant after the fourth year.