About 40 percent of non-Hodgkin's lymphomas are diffuse lymphomas with a large-cell component (DLLC). Current therapy can induce a long-term remission in half the patients with DLLC, but more intensive treatment has the potential to improve outcome, particularly in patients at high risk for treatment failure. Clinical and cytogenetic markers can identify subgroups at high or low risk. Rearrangement of a novel candidate proto-oncogene, bcl-6, is a possible prognostic indicator in DLLC.

We performed Southern blot hybridization to detect bcl-6 and bcl-2 gene rearrangement in samples of lymphoma from 102 patients with B-cell DLLC. The results were correlated with the patients' histologic features, age, disease stage, tumor sites and bulk of disease, serum lactate dehydrogenase level, and treatment outcome.

Rearranged bcl-6 was found in 23 cases, and rearranged bcl-2 in 21 cases. Nineteen of the patients with rearranged bcl-6 had extranodal DLLC, two had primary splenic lymphomas, and only one had bone marrow involvement. Thirty-six months after diagnosis, the proportion with freedom from progression of disease was projected to be 82 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 66 to 98 percent) among the patients with rearranged bcl-6, as compared with 56 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 43 to 70 percent) for the patients with germ-line bcl-6 and bcl-2 and 31 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 8 to 53 percent) for the patients with rearranged bcl-2. The status of the bcl-6 gene was an independent prognostic marker of survival and freedom from disease progression in a multivariate model and added predictive value to established prognostic signs.

Rearrangement of the bcl-6 gene correlated with a favorable clinical outcome in DLLC and may thus serve as a prognostic marker in patients with this form of malignant lymphoma.