The invention relates to a method for the effective diagnosis of patients with sporadic Burkitt's lymphoma, based on identifying protein E2F1 in biological samples from said patients, which can be performed by RT-PCR or western blot. In addition, E2F1 has been shown to play an etiopathogenic role in the aforementioned disease and, as such, E2F1-specific RNAi can be used to treat said patients.