Evaluation of peripheral lymphadenopathy with excisional biopsy: six-year experience.

BACKGROUND Lymphadenopathy (LAP) may be the first symptom of many diseases. We aimed to investigate peripheral LAP results taken by excisional biopsy. METHODS Histopathological examination of 185 lymph node biopsy specimens were evaluated between January 2009 and April 2015 in Istanbul Private Ekin Pathology Laboratory, retrospectively. RESULTS The average age of patients ranged from 1 to 86 was 41.01 ± 20.62 years. 87 of were female, 98 of male. 62 (33.5%) of excisional biopsy materials were benign lesions and 123 (66.5%) of malignant. Benign lesions were consisted of reactive hyperplasia, cat-scratch disease, toxoplasmosis, necrotizing/non-necrotizing granulomatous. Of these patients, 40 had nodes with reactive hyperplasia (15 female/25 male, mean age: 27.35 y), 14 had necrotizing granulomatous disease (9 female/5 male, mean age: 39.86 y), 2 non-necrotizing granulomatous disease (1 female/1 male mean age: 43 y), 4 had cat-scratch disease (1 female/3 male mean age: 54.25 y), 1 toxoplasmosis (26 y, female), 1 Kikuchi disease (25 y, female). In the evaluation of malign lesions; 38 were Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) (20.5%, 17 female/21 male, mean age: 34.89 y) 77 had non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) (41.6%, 37 female/40 male, mean age: 52.26 y), 8 metastasis (4.3%, 5 female/3 male, mean age: 53.5 y). Reactive LAP observed most common in cervical region, NHL in axillary-abdomen-inguinal-mediastinum and HL in the supraclavicular region. CONCLUSION Excisional biopsy can be applied safely with minimal morbidity and mortality and a gold standard diagnostic method for LAP. Although LAP is mostly related with benign lesions, malignancy should be kept in mind in differential diagnosis.