Trial Information

T-Cell Project: Epidemiologic Component

Peripheral T-cell lymphomas (PTCLs) comprise a heterogeneous group of neoplasms that are
derived from post-thymic lymphoid cells at different stages of differentiation with
different morphological patterns, phenotypes, and clinical presentations. Although a number
of case-control studies on non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) have identified various risk factors
for disease, including autoimmune conditions, family history of hematopoietic malignancies,
smoking, hepatitis C infection, and host susceptibility, these risk factors largely pertain
to B-cell lymphoma subtypes as they comprise well over 90 percent of all NHLs. At present,
there are no known epidemiologic risk factors for PTCL or its subtypes. This is largely due
to the lack of sample size of PTCL in any one epidemiologic study. The aim of this proposal
is to implement a standardized epidemiologic risk factor questionnaire into the on-going
T-Cell Project. Briefly, the T-Cell Project is an international consortium of on-going
clinical trials on peripheral PTCL. It serves as a prospective collection of patients
(greater than 18 years) worldwide with PTCL who are enrolled at participating medical
institutions for treatment in a clinical trial. The overall goal of the T-Cell Project is
to improve current T-cell subtype classifications and to evaluate different treatment
strategies for each T-cell subtype. The specific goal of our proposal is to implement,
within the T-Cell Project, a 20-minute standardized epidemiologic questionnaire to allow
evaluation of various potential risk factors for T-cell lymphomas. Importantly, there are
currently no known epidemiologic risk factors for PTCL. We plan to administer
questionnaires to 800 PTCL patients; if successful this collection would be the largest
database of PTCLs to date with epidemiologic data. If the questionnaire implementation of
assessing epidemiological risk factors for PTCL among patients in the T-Cell Project is
found logistically feasible, then descriptive and analytic epidemiologic analyses of the
collected data to understand the etiology of PTCL would be pursued at the NCI in
collaboration with members of the T-Cell Project. For such analyses, NCI would receive only
fully anonymized and de-linked data with no identifiers.