University of Iowa experts describe non-Hodgkin lymphoma--a cancer that originates in the body's disease-fighting lymphatic system--as a "good news/bad news" story.

The encouraging news begins with the fact that mortality rates for the condition have begun to decline over the past decade, indicating progress in its treatment.

The discouraging news pegs the disease as one of the nation's most rapidly increasing types of cancer, with new diagnoses more than doubling since the 1970s.

Charles Lynch, MD, PhD, medical director of the State Health Registry of Iowa, describes Non-Hodgkin lymphoma as a "spectrum of diseases that share similarities but also can be separated into subtypes that are increasingly being found to have unique risk factors and to respond to different therapies."

Adds George Weiner, MD, director of a lymphoma research center at UI and head of UI's Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center: "Some subtypes of non-Hodgkin lymphoma are among the most aggressive of all cancers, while others are so slow growing, they do not even need immediate treatment."

A primary goal is to understand how lymphoma treatments work and how to improve them, Weiner says.

"We're making significant progress in treating patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, partly because we're figuring out how to use the immune system to fight this cancer," he says. Anti-lymphoma monoclonal antibodies are extremely helpful in treating many lymphoma patients, but not in others.

Non-Hodgkin lymphoma was a special focus of this year's state cancer annual report, titled Cancer in Iowa: 2008 , issued by the State Health Registry of Iowa, based in the Department of Epidemiology within the UI College of Public Health.

The report estimates that non-Hodgkin lymphoma will cause 270 cancer deaths in Iowa in 2008, accounting for 4.3 percent of cancer deaths in both men and women.