Nodal follicular helper T-cell lymphoma may present with different patterns. A case report

Follicular T-cell lymphoma: a member of an emerging family of follicular helper T-cell derived T-cell lymphomas

“…This frequency may underestimate the overall incidence as this entity is challenging to recognize and cases can be missed [14,15,18,21]. These tumors mainly affect elderly patients, in the seventh decade, with a median and mean age of 62 years (Table 1) [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. There is a wide age range, however, from 27 to 90 years.…”

“…The nodules can be surrounded by mantle zones, or mantle zones can be absent [19,20,23,26,30]. The nodules can be sharply demarcated [16,21,24,25,28]. In PTGC-like cases, representing approximately 50% of all FTCL cases, the tumor cells form large irregular or vague nodules that mimic progressively transformed germinal centers or nodules of nodular lymphocyte predominance Hodgkin lymphoma [13,16,17,21,22,24,25,27,28].…”

“…It was not until the fourth edition of the World Health Organization (WHO) classification was published in 2008, however, that this type of T-cell lymphoma was formally recognized, and considered as a morphologic variant of PTCL-NOS [1]. This was an important step forward, partly attributable to a flurry of case reports and small case series regarding this type of T-cell lymphoma during the past two decades [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. In the literature, a number of designations have been used for these tumors, including nodular T-cell lymphoma; follicular T-cell lymphoma (FTCL); peripheral T-cell lymphoma with a nodular, follicular, or perifollicular pattern; peripheral T-cell lymphoma with follicular involvement; and follicular variant of PTCL-NOS.…”

“…Another important step forward is the recent progress in our understanding of the ontogeny of a distinct subset of CD4 + helper T-cells, known as follicular helper T-cells (T FH ), and their relationship with T-cell lymphomas, including FTCL [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44]. Follicular helper T-cells normally have the capacity to home to germinal centers (GCs).…”

“…The data are compiled from a total 80 cases from 18 case reports or case series published in the English literature from 1988 to through 2011, as well as one previously unpublished case we have encountered (Figs. 1 and 2) [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. Cases that have been reported more than once in different publications are combined correspondingly [20,24,25].…”