Lymphoma: What is lymphoma? | Norton Cancer Institute

Don A. Stevens, M.D., Medical Oncologist at Norton Healthcare, explains what lymphoma, a blood cancer, is.

It's a blood cancer that typically presents with swollen lymph nodes. Lymph nodes are a tissue in the body where your lymphocytes mature. It's part of your immune system and it's responsible for filtering some of your blood in some capacity to get rid of things that shouldn't be there. Lymph nodes are the glands as you may recall, when you were a child, you had a bad sore throat, and you would have what your mother would describe as your swollen glands. These aren't in the medical sense glands but these are what people used to call glands or sometimes do still call glands. These lymph nodes are basically accumulation of lymph tissue, they're a type of white corpuscle.

There are, as we discuss with leukemia dozens of different types and sub types of lymphomas. Again, because these lymphocytes are maturing and they can go from good to bad and there's many different types of lymphocytes, they can go from good to bad at any point. Where they go bad and how they go bad determines whether the disease say, results in just a large spleen, which is a blood organ usually tucked under the left rib cage but can be quite large. Or whether the lymphoma presents in your neck with swollen lymph nodes or in the groin or the abdomen or in the chest. There are lymphomas that involve basically anyplace in the body, you can have one lymphomas in the brain, it's very rare but that happens. There can be lymphomas in the back of your throat because of all the lymph tissue there, lymphomas in the GI tract, the intestines, basically anywhere.

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

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