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The role of antibodies of CD15 as diagnostic markers of Hodgkin's disease was assessed from a review of the literature. A total of 571 cases of Hodgkin's disease and 386 cases of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma were included. The sensitivity of CD15 in detecting cases of Hodgkin's disease was 80% or 91% if cases of lymphocyte predominant Hodgkin's disease were excluded. The specificity of CD15 was only 80.6%, or in other words, 19.4% of cases of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma were CD15 positive. In an ideal test both the sensitivity and specificity would be 100% and if the test performance were no better than chance then they would both be 50%. It is concluded that CD15 immunostaining cannot be regarded as a sensitive or specific marker of Hodgkin's disease. Application of this formal method of analysis to other immunohistological reagents and panels of antibodies is discussed.
Hall et al. (Sun,) studied this question.