Systemic Rheumatic Disease and Malignant Lymphoma

Abstract

Although patients with malignant lymphoma occasionally have articular complaints, the occurrence of frank rheumatic disease is unusual and the basis for the joint symptoms is often poorly understood. Patients with rheumatoid arthritis or systemic lupus erythematosus may have hyperplastic lymphadenopathy which, on occasion, may be difficult clinically to distinguish from lymphoma. While the concurrence of systemic rheumatic disease and lymphoma has been noted in several individual case reports (Table), there appears to be no previous instance in which there has been convincing pathologic evidence of an association between systemic lupus erythematosus and lymphoma. We first became interested in this problem in 1959 because of the unexpected finding of disseminated Hodgkin's disease in a patient who had clinical, serologic and pathologic evidence of systemic lupus erythematosus (Case 1). This led to a search for similar cases. Review of our records for the previous 5 years failed to disclose a single additional