Re: Evidence for an Association Between Chlamydia psittaci and Ocular Adnexal Lymphomas

Extract

Ferreri et al. ( 1 ) recently reported that patients with ocular adnexal lymphoma had a high prevalence of Chlamydia psittaci infection in both tumor tissues and peripheral blood mononuclear cells. More recently, one study reported a similar prevalence of the infection in a Korean patient series ( 2 ) , whereas three other studies did not observe such an association ( 3 – 5 ) .

To investigate the reasons for these different results, our two laboratories, one in Milan (which produced the Ferrari et al. manuscript) and one in Paris, investigated both in independent blinded duplicate the presence of C. psittaci , C. trachomatis , and C. pneumoniae DNA in tumor samples from ophthalmologic biopsies obtained from 16 French patients with ocular adnexal lymphoma and from tissue of two control subjects with other types of lymphoproliferative disease. All 16 patients had histologically proven non-Hodgkin lymphoma of the ocular adnexa (10 at conjunctival sites and six at intraorbital sites). Ten samples from tumor lymph node biopsies from patients diagnosed with marginal zone B-cell lymphoma ( n = 8), splenic-type marginal zone B-cell lymphoma ( n = 1), and follicular lymphoma ( n = 1) were also obtained; 10 nodal biopsy samples from patients diagnosed with reactive lymphoid hyperplasia were also collected.