Characteristics of the Study Cohort.

1Among 3,315 assessable patients in our data base, 209 died early, due to early toxic death (n = 163, 4.9%), other cancers (n = 8, 0.2%), unknown reasons (n = 17), probable but not formally proven lymphoma progression (n = 21); overall, 3,106 could be properly evaluated for response to therapy;2B-cell lymphoma was classified into four groups, i.e.: Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma (DLB-CL), Follicular Lymphoma (FL), Mantle-Cell Lymphoma (MCL), and miscellaneous histologies, including marginal-zone (MZL), small lymphocytic (SL), and Burkitt’s and lymphoblastic lymphoma; 3low-grade lymphoma included FL-MZL-SL-low-grade T-cell lymphoma, all remaining subtypes, i.e. MCL, DLCL, transformed-FL, high-grade peripheral T-cell NHL, other aggressive histotypes (Burkitt’s and Burkitt-like NHL, Lymphoblastic lymphoma) were included among intermediate/high-grade histologies; 4IPI: International Prognostic Index: assessed in all diffuse large-cell lymphoma, and low-grade lymphoma; 5the Lymphocyte to Monocyte (LM) ratio was assessed at diagnosis by automatic blood count; 6Chemotherapy was delivered to all patients, according to various schedules, as detailed in the text.missing values: * = 1; ** = 73 (2.2%); *** = 526 (15.9%); † = 491 (14.8%); †† (including cases where IPI was NA) = 818 (24.7%); ‡ = 1,155 (34.8%); ††† = 49 (1.5%); § = 66 (2.1%).Characteristics of the Study Cohort.