Geography Key to Hodgkin's Disease Outcomes

European patients fare worse than those in U.S., study finds

MONDAY, June 12, 2006 (HealthDay News) -- Where a patient with the blood cancer Hodgkin's disease resides may determine what form of the disease he has -- and the prognosis.

Nodular sclerosis is the most prevalent form of the disease in the United States. However, the study, which was published online Monday and will appear in the July 15 issue of Cancer, showed that a variety of HD types occur in European patients.

For five years, researchers from the Istituto Nazionale per lo Studio e la Cura dei Tumori in Milan, Italy and the EUROCARE Working Group studied over 6,700 Hodgkin's patient histories from 37 European cancer registries. They also studied more than 3,400 patients from nine registries in the United States.

The type of Hodgkin's disease the patient had seemed to be the cause for varying mortality risk between the United Kingdom and eastern European cases. Even after adjusting for the disease type, eastern European patients still maintained a higher risk of mortality than their counterparts in the U.K.

Researchers calculated the death risk using the "relative excess risk" of death, and noticed no significant differences in mortality between western European and U.S. patients of any type of Hodgkin's disease.

These results indicate that not only the type of Hodgkin's disease may indicate mortality -- but also the stage at which the patient was diagnosed and treatments that were utilized.

"Differences in excess risk of death between the geographic regions diminished when corrected for morphology, indicating that differences in morphologic case mix are an important determinant of regional survival differences for HD," study author Claudia Allemani said in a prepared statement.

The study also confirmed previous study results that showed that Hodgkin's tumors with lymphocytic depletion often brought a higher mortality rate, while tumors with lymphocytic predominance had far better prognoses.

More information

To read more on Hodgkin's Disease, visit the American Cancer Society.

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