[en] The majority of lymphomas are sensitive and respond well to relatively low doses of irradiation. Careful staging of Hodgkin's disease patients selects the patients who can be cured with irradiation alone, and the combination of chemotherapy and irradiation may result in cure of complete remission in all types of lymphoma. In non-Hodgkin's disease and late stage Hodgkin's disease, radiotherapy is a very useful modality for palliating bulky disease, and treating bone infliltration or other painful areas

[en] A series of 100 patients with Hodgkins disease were submitted to staging laparotomy, without mortality and with negligible morbidity. Thirty-one patients were restaged: 23 had occult intra-abdominal disease and 8 false-positive lymphangiograms. Standardized treatment programmes were tested against our clinical and pathological data to determine whether staging laparotomy would alter therapeutic decisions. Programmes based on clinical staging and employing radical radiotherapy would have encompassed all disease without recourse to laparotomy. In contrast, a more conservative programme which employed mantle field irradiation for clinically localized cervical disease, without laparotomy, would have missed disease in 12% of cases. Patiens with supradiaphragmatic nodal Hodgkins disease should either have prophylactic abdominal irradiation (without laparotomy) or more limited radiotherapy determined by laparotomy (without prophylactic irradiation)

No abstract available

No abstract available