Dan L. Longo, MD

Dr. Ganti and colleagues from the University of Nebraska provide a thorough review of the management of patients with follicular lymphoma, including many recent additions to the therapeutic armamentarium. The field is rapidly changing, and this article will be an enduring resource both for clinicians currently managing these patients and for anyone in the future who wants to understand what the state of the art was in 2004. Follicular lymphoma accounts for about one-third of non- Hodgkin’s lymphomas in the United States, making it likely that an individual oncologist will see one to three patients with follicular lymphoma each year. As the authors point out, numerous active agents have been developed for use in patients with follicular lymphoma over the past 5 years and additional promising new therapeutic agents and novel approaches (eg, vaccination) are in the development pipeline.

Drs. Ng and Mauch do an excellent job of summarizing the current conventional wisdom regarding the management of patients with clinical early-stage Hodgkin’s disease, although their citation of some studies is selective. Today nearly all patients with Hodgkin’s disease receive combined-modality therapy-usually an abbreviated course of a chemotherapy regimen (often one that has not been shown to cure the disease when used alone) followed by 20 to 40 Gy of involved-field radiation therapy. This approach certainly hides a multitude of sins. If you don’t give chemotherapy well, you can still achieve good disease control with the radiation therapy. If you can’t design a radiation port that encompasses known sites of disease, you can still get by because the systemic chemotherapy will leave relatively little for the radiation therapy to do.