Clinical and molecular analyses of castleman's disease

Castleman's disease is a morphologically and clinically heterogeneous lyrnphoproliferative disorder. Both hyaline vascular (HV) and plasma cell (PC) type were described. Systemic multicentric manifestation with a higher risk to develop malignant lymphoma was known in the latter type. Formaline-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissue from 15 Castleman's diseases were analyzed for clonal irnrnunoglobulin heavy chain rearrangement {IHR; by a semi-nest polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify the complementary determining region III. As a sensitivity control, 92% of IHR detected by Southern blot analysis in malignant lymphoma was PCR positive. However, neither the HV (7 cases) or the PC (8 cases) type of and neither localized (7HVs and 2PCs) or multicentric (6PCs) Castleman's disease showed monoclonality. Clonality analysis in Castleman's disease thus seemed to be ineffective in predicting the disease behaviors.