What are the different types of follicular lymphoma?

What are the different types of follicular lymphoma?

Yeah, so the answer to that question, just like many other lymphomas, is getting more and more complicated as we learn more. Traditionally follicular lymphoma has kind of been grouped by staging sort of early stage, namely, is it just one lymph node group or kind of early stage lymphoma?

Is most Follicular lymphomas are going to be more advanced stage. And then we look at things like what we call grading and some of the features around what molecules are associated in the tumor itself.

Traditionally, we've thought about most follicular lymphoma being what we call low grade follicular lymphoma. So there is these grading schemes that I'm not sure pathologist can always explain these well, but they kind of know it when they see it, is that you get into these what's called grade one or two and then there's what's called grade three.

And then, you know, really now if it's grade one to or what we call three a, as that's what's kind of called classical follicular lymphoma, sort of the what we usually think about in terms of a follicular lymphoma diagnosis.

There's another group that they call grade three B, follicular lymphoma. It tends to have a more aggressive course and really should be more considered kind of an equivalent to what's called diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, which is a more aggressive but still very treatable B-cell lymphoma.

As we've developed more advanced technologies and learn more about some of the particular types of lymphoma out there, there's even more criteria. There's some pediatric types of follicular lymphoma. There's some follicular lymphomas that are associated with very specific genetic rearrangements that occur in the lymphoma cells themselves.

And many of those are helpful for tracking the trajectory or prognosis of patients. And I think, you know, as we go years and years from now, we're going to have many different kind of subtypes of these defined by the specific molecules like DNA and proteins that are found in the tumors themselves.

So there are a number of different types of follicular lymphoma. And in most cases we have the, I think the best way to describe it is follicular lymphoma. That just involves the lymph nodes, which is the most common form.

Within that, we do have different grades of follicular lymphoma. So early grade or low grade would be a kind of a slow growing disease, whereas high grade might be more rapidly growing disease.

There are other types of follicular lymphoma. Sometimes it could be called cutaneous where it just involves the skin. We can have the follicular lymphoma that involves the gastrointestinal tract.

So there are different types of skin involved, different areas. The most common form will be a follicular lymphoma that just involves the lymph nodes themselves.