Lymphoma: Are there different types? | Norton Cancer Institut

Don A. Stevens, M.D., Medical Oncologist at Norton Healthcare, tells us about the different types of lymphoma.

There are dozens of types but with Hodgkin's disease or Hodgkin's lymphoma, the most up-to-date classifications call it Hodgkin's lymphoma and not Hodgkin's disease because there was a period of time in our medical history where there was some debate whether or not it was actually a cancer and that was debated for some time but we now know that it is a form of lymphoma.

We now know exactly what cell is involved so it is a type of lymphoma. The reason that for a long time we had Hodgkin's and then everything else was non-Hodgkin is that Thomas Hodgkin was the first physician many years ago to describe lymph nodes that were not enlarged because of infection. When Hodgkin reported this way back in the first part of the 19th century when doctors saw swollen nodes they were from syphilis or tuberculosis.

So, what Thomas Hodgkin did was look at them very closely and say, "Hey these patients have something else, this is not an infection". And so in ten to fifteen years later another pathologist came along and said, "Hey this is..." They realized that Thomas Hodgkin had already described it so then he said this is Hodgkin's disease, so Hodgkin didn't name it, someone else did, someone named Wilkes and then it was twenty years later that true lymphomas were described. People were able to see that there was a difference between those and Hodgkin's and so for many years we called it non-Hodgkin and Hodgkin’s and now we call it all malignant lymphomas.

Again, there are many, many different types of lymphomas.

Learn more about lymphoma https://www.nortonhealthcare.com/Lymphoma

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