الفهرس 
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Abstract
Non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) represents a health problem throughout the world. It is the fifth most common type of cancer and continues to increase rapidly. This increasing incidence worldwide may be explained by availability of better diagnostic tests and imaging techniques, aging of population and prevalence of environmental pesticides and viruses specially HIV.
International co-operation efforts has resulted in development of international prognostic index (IPI) to determine prognosis in patients with NHL, it is based on age, performance status, serum LDH, stage and number of extra nodal sites. IPI provides prognostic information to large cell lymphoma as well as other types of NHL.
Anemia is defined in our study as Hb level less than 12 g/dl for all men and for women over 50 years old and less than 11 g/dl for women less than 50 years of age.
The most common causes of anemia in NHL include chemotherapy induced anemia, anemia of chronic disease (ACD), autoimmune hemolytic anemia and lymphomatous infiltration of the bone marrow.
Anemia is studied through this work to evaluate its importance as a predictive factor for response for chemotherapy treatment and its impact on prognosis.
This was achieved through a retrospective study of 50 patients with NHL (high and intermediate grade) with special attention to IPI variables, hemoglobin levels at 0, 3, 6 cycles of chemotherapy, treatment outcome and follow up survival data.
This study has shown that anemia is present in 48% of NHL patients at presentation and it is significantly associated with bad international prognostic index for lymphoma (IPI >2), poor response to chemotherapy (treatment outcome), relatively short relapse free survival (RFS) and short survival follow up periods. On the other hand, anemia has no significant difference as regard response to different chemotherapy regimens CHOP and R-CHOP.
These results emphasis the importance of anemia as a predictive factor for response to chemotherapy and its prognostic value in NHL patients. Finally anemia has to be taken into account in the future prognostic studies, since hemoglobin value is easy to measure, cheap and easily reproducible.