Nasal T- c e l l Lymphoma: A Clinicopathologic Entity Associated With Peculiar Phenotype and With Epstein-Barr Virus

Recent evidence has shown that most nasal lymphomas (NL) are associated with a T-cell phenotype and are thus called nasal T-cell lymphomas (NTCL), but little information is available about the T-cell receptor (TCR) expression. The presence of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) genome has been re-cently reported in NTCL in Oriental populations in which NL and EBV-associated tumors are more common and in occasional Occidental cases. This prompted us to investi-gate lymphoma biopsies from 7 non-Oriental patients with NTCL for the expression of natural killer (NK) and T-cell antigens, including TCR proteins, for the presence of EBV-encoded latent membrane protein (LMP) using immunohis-tochemistry and for the presence of EBV DNA and Epstein-Barr early region (EBER) RNA using in situ hybridization (ISH). Six cases displayed a CD3-, TCRaB-, TCRy6-