Cytogenetics of T-cell malignant lymphoma. Report of 17 cases and review of the chromosomal breakpoints.

Cytogenetic studies are reported on 17 T-cell malignant lymphomas (ML) including six cutaneous T-cell malignant lymphomas (CTCL). Due to the low incidence of rearrangements on bands where the T-cell receptor genes are located, other cases reported in the literature were analyzed in order to estimate the most frequent chromosomal breakpoints in ML, CTCL, and adult T-cell leukemia-lymphoma. Besides chromosomes 1 and 6q, 14q11, 7p15p21, and 7q32q35, the most frequent rearrangements involved bands 14q32, 2p11-p14, 2p23-p25, 17cen, 9p21p23, and 10p13p15. These results show that molecular studies must be concentrated on these chromosomal regions in order to identify the DNA sequences that may be involved in T-cell malignancies.