文摘
A 76-year-old Asian man with a 6-month history of intractable watery diarrhea proceeded to colonoscopic examination that revealed diffusely dull-appearing colonic mucosa with focal areas of superficial ulceration. Mucosal biopsies demonstrated a neoplastic population of monomorphous small-to-intermediate-sized CD8+/CD56+ cytotoxic T cells that densely infiltrated the surface epithelium and crypts in a near pan-colonic distribution without tumor formation. Clinical staging revealed no disease elsewhere. The patient was treated aggressively with chemotherapy but died from disease five and a half months after presentation. In all likelihood, the patient had primary colonic involvement by enteropathy-associated T cell lymphoma (EATL) type II, a rare and aggressive extranodal non-Hodgkin lymphoma that occurs more commonly in Asians in whom celiac disease is infrequent. Widespread colonic disease in the absence of a mass-forming infiltrate has not been characterized in EATL type II and highlights an expanded clinical and pathological spectrum of the disease.