Fine needle aspiration cytodiagnosis of Hodgkin's disease and its subtypes. I. Scope and limitations.

The fine needle aspiration (FNA) smears and paraffin-embedded sections from 89 cases with a cytologic and histologic diagnosis of Hodgkin's disease (HD) and 27 cases with minor or major cytohistologic discrepancies were reviewed. The accuracy of the initial cytologic study was found to be 91.8% for diagnosing HD and 58.1% for classifying its subtypes. Following review, 87 of the 89 agreement cases remained classified as HD. Of the 27 cases with initial cytohistologic discrepancies, 12 were classified as HD and 10 were categorized as lymphocytic or non-Hodgkin's lymphoma by both cytology and histology upon review. Following review, the accuracy of FNA cytology for the diagnosis of HD improved to 98.0%, with 71.4% correct subtyping. The greatest limitation of cytologic subtyping was in cases of nodular sclerotic HD: only 3 of 17 cases could be subtyped even after review. The cytomorphologic features of the HD subtypes are described, and the difficulties encountered in the cytodiagnosis of HD are discussed at length. The results of this study indicate that FNA cytology is a useful tool not only for the diagnosis of HD, but also for its subtyping.