Clinical dissection of multicentric Castleman disease
This study investigated the prognostic factors of Castleman disease (CD) and focused specifically on multicentric CD (MCD). Seventy patients with CD were studied. Forty-three patients (61.5%) had unicentric CD (UCD) and 27 patients (38.5%) had MCD. Thirty-six patients with UCD (83.7%) underwent surgical excision, and 25 patients with MCD (92.6%) received systemic treatment, including corticosteroids and combination chemotherapy. In the patients with MCD, age >60 years and the presence of splenomegaly were prognostic factors for progression-free survival (hazard ratio [HR] 9.01, 95% confidence interval [CI] 2.64-30.83 and HR 4.32, 95% CI 1.16-16.09) as well as overall survival (OS) in MCD (HR 8.7, 95% CI 2.83-26.84 and HR 2.9, 95% CI 0.95-9.02, respectively). Patients  ≤ 60 years old without splenomegaly showed better OS than patients  > 60 years old or with splenomegaly (71.4% vs. 10.8% for 5-year OS). MCD might be dissected clinically by the simple parameters of age and presence of splenomegaly.