from about 10% to 90%. the lower the percentage, the lower the speed of maturity, and the more indolent the disease. katzenberger et al. blood 2006;107:3407 graphs survival versus time for subsets of patients with varying ki-67 indices. he shows median survival times of about one year for 61-90% ki-67 and nearly 4 years for 5-20% ki-67 index. mcl cell types can aid in prognosis in a subjective way. blastic is a larger cell type. diffuse is spread through the node. nodular are small groups of collected cells spread through the node. diffuse and nodular are similar in behavior. blastic is faster growing and it is harder to get long remissions. some thought is that given a long time, some non-blastic mcl transforms to blastic. although survival of most blastic patients is shorter, some data shows that 25% of blastic mcl patients survive to 5 years. that is longer than diffuse type and almost as long as nodular (almost 7 yrs). beta-2 microglobulin is another risk factor in mcl used primarily for transplant patients. values less than three have yielded 95% overall survival to six years for auto sct where over three yields a median of 44 most overall survival for auto sct (khouri 03). this is not yet fully validated. testing for high levels of lactate dehydrogenase (ldh) in nhl patients is useful because ldh is released when body tissues break down for any reason. while it cannot be used as a sole means of diagnosing nhl, it is a surrogate for tracking tumor burden in those diagnosed by other means. the normal range is approximately 100–190. epidemiology 6% of non-hodgkin lymphoma cases are mantle cell lymphoma. as of 2015, the ratio of males to females affected is about 4:1.