Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Tests and diagnosis
By Mayo Clinic staffYour doctor may use these procedures to help diagnose non-Hodgkin's lymphoma:
- Physical examination. Your doctor may examine not only your swollen lymph nodes but also your other lymph nodes to determine their size and consistency.
- Blood and urine tests. Usually, having swollen lymph nodes means you're fighting an infection. Blood and urine tests may help your doctor rule out an infection or other disease.
-
Imaging techniques. An X-ray or computerized tomography (CT) scan of your chest, neck, abdomen and pelvis may detect the presence and size of tumors. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans can help your doctor determine whether your brain and spinal cord are affected. Doctors also use positron emission tomography (PET) scanning to detect non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
For a PET scan, a small amount of a radioactive tracer is injected into your body. This tracer is then absorbed by your tissues. Tumors are typically more metabolically active than other tissues, so they absorb more of the tracer. A PET scan also may be repeated after the first or second course of chemotherapy to see if the treatment is working. Tumors that respond to chemotherapy don't absorb the tracer.
- Lymph node biopsy. Taking a sample of lymph node tissue for examination in the laboratory may reveal whether you have non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and, if so, which type. This procedure may show the lymphoma to be growing slowly (low grade), at a moderate rate (intermediate grade) or rapidly (high grade). Knowing the growth rate of your tumor can help determine which treatment is best for you.
- Bone marrow biopsy. To find out whether the disease has spread, your doctor may request a biopsy of your bone marrow. This involves inserting a needle into your pelvic bones to obtain a sample of bone marrow.
Classifying the condition
Doctors classify non-Hodgkin's disease into about 30 types. Besides the differentiation between B cell and T cell types of the disease, classification is based on several other factors. These include:
- Microscopic appearance
- Cellular genetic changes
- Cell size
- Staining patterns with specific antibody stains
- How the cancer cells group together
- How fast the cancer grows
Doctors also assign a stage (I through IV) to the disease, based on the number of tumors and how widely the tumors have spread.
