Clinical and Paraclinical Features, Outcome, and Prognosis of Extranodal Natural Killer/T-Cell Lymphoma, Nasal Type: A Retrospective Study of 31 Vietnamese Patients

Extranodal natural killer (NK)/T-cell lymphoma, nasal type is a rare, aggressive, and poor prognostic subtype. The concurrent chemoradiotherapy followed by chemotherapy showed a relatively high response rate and the toxicity due to the treatment is acceptable. The study attempted to report the clinicopathological features, the survival outcome, and response rates of stages I-II, nasal type ENKTL patients treated with CCRT followed by adjuvant VIPD chemotherapy in Vietnam.

The current study was conducted on 31 stage I or II NK/T cell lymphoma, nasal-type patients received by CCRT, followed by adjuvant VIPD chemotherapy. Information on patient demographics, disease stage, clinical symptoms, tumor, and paraclinical characteristics were collected. The primary endpoints of this study were OS and response rates.

After CCRT, 26 out of 31 (83.9%) patients had stable disease or response. Overall response rate (ORR) was observed in 80.6% of patients with a complete response rate of 67.7%. Low-risk PINK patients had a higher response rate than the intermediate- risk group(p=0.038). Mean disease-free survival was 44.3±4.5 months (95% CI, 35.4-53.1 months). Mean overall survival was 46.8±4.5 months (95% CI, 37.99-55.8 months). The intermediate-risk PINK patients had a significantly lower OS rate than low-risk patients.

Concurrent chemoradiotherapy followed by adjuvant VIPD chemotherapy showed a high response rate and survival benefit in stages I-II, nasal type, and extranodal natural killer (NK)/T-cell lymphoma Vietnamese patients.