[Effective evaluation of combination chemotherapy in stage I-II of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma--a comparison of treatment with multivariate analysis].

: Sixty-one patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (Stage I and II) were treated solely with radiotherapy or in combination with chemotherapy. A multivariate analysis was used to identify the prognostic factors that significantly affected the treatment outcome. The variables examined included: stage of disease, according to the Ann Arbor classification, sex, age, pathological criteria, according to the LSG, the presence or absence of systemic symptoms, the sites of disease involvement, the LDH, the bulk of the disease, and the combination chemotherapy. Variables achieving a p-value in the 0 to 0.10 range with a multivariate analysis for the overall survival were the stage of disease, the sites of the disease involvement, the bulk of the disease, and the combination chemotherapy. Finally, the overall survival was affected by bulk of the disease (p less than 0.01) and the combination chemotherapy (p less than 0.01). The 5-year survival rates were 84.4% for stage I and 50.7% for stage II. The survival rates were 47.5% for radiotherapy treatment alone and 75.3% for combination chemotherapy. It thus was concluded that combination chemotherapy was effective for treatment of stages I and II of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.