While the 2008 revision of the World Health Organization Classification of Tumors of the Hematopoietic and Lymphoid Tissues does not contain major changes from the 2001 edition, it may answer questions clinicians still have, said Nancy Lee Harris, MD, Professor of Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital, speaking in a presentation at the International Conference on Malignant Lymphoma. Dr. Harris called the 2008 changes incremental, incorporatingdata from research in the previous seven years. This makes the classification more practical, she said, and some of the entities are better defined—for example, the gray zone between mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma and classical Hodgkin lymphomas is addressed. And while various subcategories of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma are all treated the same, they actually have slightly different clinical presentations so that clinicians may recognize them when they see patients, she said. “This might change diagnosis and risk stratification and what they tell their patients.” Dr. Harris was candid when comparing the responses of clinicians to the new classification with less enthusiastic responses from some pathologists. “Clinicians seem almost more receptive than pathologists because this classification explains the complexity of their patients, and they recognize these diseases. It is not a problem recognizing a lot of diseases if they all mean something to you. ...

For the list of new classifications, visit the following site:
http://hematopathologist.com/blog/?p=31