Presentation and Outcome of Castleman's Disease in Immunocompetent Hosts.

Castleman's disease (CD) is a heterogeneous lymphoproliferative disorder of unknown aetiology. Mostly, this disorder is seen in immunocompromised hosts. It is known to be associated with systemic disorders like HIV, HHV-8, lymphoma, and Kaposi sarcoma. As of today, the clinical behaviour and outcome of CD in immunocompetent host remains suboptimally studied. We analyzed consecutively treated cases of CD presented to our centre in last 12 years. Case record files were studied for patient's characteristics, clinical presentation, baseline laboratory and pathologic parameters, therapy and outcome. This study describes presentation and treatment outcome of CD in immunocompetent patients. Total 16 patients of CD were treated during the study period. The median age of patients at the time of presentation was 40.5 years (range 13-72 years). An equal number of patients (8 each) had unicentric and multicentric CD. Sixty-three percent patients had hyaline vascular subtype while 37 % patients had plasma cell or mixed variant. Majority of the patients had good performance status (ECOG PS 0, 1 in 10 (62.5 %) patients; PS2-4 in 6 (37.5 %) patients). The median duration of symptoms was 6 months (range 2-36 months). None of the patients in our study had associated HIV infection. Six patients presented with fever, out of which four had plasma cell variant of CD and three of them had multicentric involvement. In comparison to unicentric CD, patients with multicentric CD had lower albumin levels (4.15 vs. 3.38 g/dl,