[Clinical significance of the bone marrow examination in small cell carcinoma of the lung].

To study the clinical relevance of bone-marrow metastasis, bone-marrow biopsy and aspiration from the posterior iliac crest were performed in 11 consecutive patients with small cell carcinoma of the lung. Six of the 11 patients (54.5%) showed tumor cell involvement in the bone marrow. In 4 patients with bone-marrow metastasis, myelocytes and metamyelocytes were present in the peripheral blood. Aspiration was diagnostically more valuable than bone-marrow biopsy. Bone scintigrams, using 99mTc-MDP, correlated with the bone-marrow involvement except in one case, where false-negative results were obtained. The areas of bone-marrow metastasis did not match well with the positive lesions detected by bone scintigraphy.