الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) is considered a relatively uncommon disease in which a proportion of cases still show resistance to initial therapy. For this group of cases, many studies were conducted seeking new prognostic markers that could predict resistance to initial therapy. Tumor associated macrophages are considered an excellent candidate based on their different roles in different stages of tumor development – most of which are considered protumoral. A strong association was found between high macrophage percentage and poor prognosis in many solid as well as hematological malignancies – including HL – as well as a predictive role for resistance to initial therapy in many recent studies.
The present study aimed at evaluating the role of tumor associated macrophages in HL and correlating macrophage percentage with some clinicopathological parameters of the disease as patients’ age, stage at presentation, histologic subtype, microvessel density and B cell infiltrate in the tumor microenvironment.
To achieve this aim, immunohistochemical detection of tumor associated macrophages was done in whole tissue sections using a commercially available and a relatively cheap marker (CD68). Evaluation was done by a simple semiquantitative method. The percentage of tumor associated macrophages was calculated relative to the total number of non neoplastic cells in the microenvironment.
Thirty five cases were included in the present study; whose age ranged from four to 80 years with a mean of 35.87±21.058 years. Eighteen cases were males (51%) and seventeen were females (49%). The clinical presentation of the studied cases was lymphadenopathy affecting either a single group of lymph nodes (18 cases, 51%) or multiple groups (17 cases, 49%). B symptoms were found in only four cases (11.42%). According to the Ann Arbor Staging system and its Cotswolds’ modification in 1989, eighteen of the cases were stage I (51.4%), four were stage II (11.4%), eleven were stage III (31.4%) and two were stage IV (5.7%). For statistical purposes, stage I and II cases were considered early disease while stage III and IV cases were considered advanced disease.