Bone Marrow Involvement in Small Cell Lung Cancer

Determination of bone marrow involvement is important in sta­ging, treatment planning and the prognosis of SCLC. The aim of the present study is to find out the frequency of bone mar­row involvement by bone marrow biopsy and its relation with the clinical and laboratory findings. For this reason, we have done bone marrow biopsy from the unilateral iliac bone crest of the 30 histopathologically diagnosed and therapy naive SCLC patients. We discovered bone marrow involvement in 9 patients (30%). While 8 of these cases had additional organ me­tastasis, in one of them bone marrow was the only metastatic focus. Haematologically, we detected leucoerythroblastosis in the peripheral blood of 44% of the cases having bone marrow involvement and this was statistically significant with respect to the ones not having involvement (P<0.01). However, there wasn’t a significant difference between the two groups by me­ans of anaemia, thrombositopenia and other biochemical para­meters. We also didn’t establish any correlation between the bone marrow involvement and the bone scan.