Minimal Disseminated Disease in Childhood T-Cell Lymphoblastic Lymphoma: A Report From the Children's Oncology Group

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Abstract
Purpose Disease dissemination to the bone marrow is detected at diagnosis in approximately 15% of children with T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma (T-LL). It is unclear whether the remaining patients have submicroscopic systemic disease and, if so, what is the clinical significance of this finding. Patients and Methods Using a flow cytometric method that can detect one T-LL cell among 10,000 normal cells, we examined bone marrow and peripheral-blood samples collected from 99 children with T-LL at diagnosis, as well as blood samples collected from 42 patients during treatment. Results In 71 (71.7%) of the 99 marrow samples obtained at diagnosis, T-LL cells represented 0.01% to 31.6% (median, 0.22%) of mononuclear cells; 57 of the 71 T-LL–positive samples were from patients with stage II/III disease. Results of studies in bilateral marrow aspirates were highly concordant. Two-year event-free survival (EFS) was 68.1% ± 11.1% (SE) for patients with ≥ 1% T-LL cells in bone marrow versus 90.7% ± 4.4% for those with ...

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