**3. Part 2. Clinical aspects of MALT gastric lymphomas**

## **3.1 Materials and methods**

Blokhin National Medical Research Center of Oncology analyzed the data of 68 patients with early stages of gastric MALT lymphoma who received initial treatment from 1973 to 2004 [8]. The median follow-up was 61 months. The prevalence of female patients was noted - 64.71% versus 35.29%, almost half of the patients - 48.7% were over 60 years old. In accordance with the criteria for dividing gastric MALT lymphomas into categories depending on the number and nature of growth of blast-transformed cells, the patients were distributed as follows: small cell subvariant - 31 (45.6%); intermediate - 22 (32.4%) and mixed - 15 (22.0%). *H. pylori* infection was found in 54 patients - 85.7%.

A comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of therapy consisted in summarizing clinical, morphoimmunological, radiological, ultrasound and endoscopic data. To assess the long-term results, the indicators of the duration of the delaying time to relapse, event-free and overall survival were used. To determine the reliability of the results obtained, the X-2 criterion and the Student's test were used to plot the survival curves - according to the Kaplan and Meier method, the comparison of the curves was performed using the Lograng test.

## **3.2 Analysis of clinical characteristics**

A comparative analysis of the clinical characteristics of 3 groups of patients was carried out according to morphological variants, which made it possible to identify the clinical features of each of them (**Table 6**):



#### **Table 6.**

*Characteristics of patients with stage I-II gastric MALT lymphomas.*

volume) and on adjacent organs and lymph nodes, the presence of *Helicobacter pylori* infection is detected in the form of a moderate degree of bacterial content.

• Mixed-cell gastric MALT lymphomas develop in young people (median - 41 years), with intense permanent pain syndrome, with a predominance of infiltrative-ulcerative and ulcerative forms of growth, with a tendency to early spread to regional lymph nodes - by the time of diagnosis in 2 / 3 patients, stage II is detected, and *Helicobacter pylori* infection is observed in only half of the patients.
