Srpski arhiv za celokupno lekarstvo 2016 Volume 144, Issue 9-10, Pages: 557-561
https://doi.org/10.2298/SARH1610557C
Full text ( 258 KB)
Vojislav Arnovljević described "Sézary syndrome" ten years before Sézary and Bouvrain
Čolović Nataša (School of Medicine, Belgrade + Clinical Center of Serbia, Clinic of Haematology, Belgrade)
Janković Marko (School of Medicine, Institute of Microbiology, Belgrade)
Leković Danijela (School of Medicine, Belgrade + Clinical Center of Serbia, Clinic of Haematology, Belgrade)
Gotić Mirjana (School of Medicine, Belgrade + Clinical Center of Serbia, Clinic of Haematology, Belgrade)
In 1938 Sezary and Bouvrain reported on a patient with a set of symptoms
which later began to carry an eponymous designation “Sezary syndrome.” Ten
years previously, Vojislav Arnovljević had described a patient with exactly
the same set of symptoms, as well as physical, laboratory, autopsy, and
histopathology findings. Unfortunately, his contribution remained unnoticed,
not only by the international but Serbian audience as well. In 1928, in the
Serbian Archives of Medicine, in Serbian, Vojislav Arnovljević published an
article titled “The chronic lymphoid leukaemia with skin lymphomatosis,” in
which he described a 43-year-old man with a two-year history of progressive
development of a diffuse erythroderma with itching and hair loss over the
entire torso, leukemia of 240,000/mm3, 91% of which lymphocytes and 5%
eosinophils, who soon after admission developed a bronchopulmonary infection
and died. The autopsy showed a pronounced lymphadenopathy in axillae, chest,
and abdomen, enlarged liver and spleen with multiple infiltrates and thick
skin. The histology confirmed a profound lymphocyte infiltration of axillar,
mediastinal and abdominal lymph nodes, as well as liver, spleen and skin,
while “the reaction of the other parts of the lymph and blood systems was
relatively weak.” There is more than enough clinical, laboratory, autopsy and
histological evidence to support that the patient Arnovljević described in
1928 had a syndrome that ten years later was described by Sezary and
Bouvrain, which now bears the eponymous designation of Sezary syndrome.
Keywords: erythroderma, itching, lymphadenopathy, lymphoid leukemia, еоsinophilia, hepatosplenomegaly