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Video

What percentage of patients are diagnosed in the general oncology setting and not referred?

Posted by
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• January 22, 2022

Description

Learn about percentage of patients who are diagnosed in the general oncology setting not referred in this HealthTree University lesson by a cancer specialist.

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Transcript

What percentage of patients are diagnosed in the general oncology setting and not referred to an AML specialty center? It's a good question about what percentage of patients are referred. I think one of the things that we know with some certainty is that especially patients that are older, so AML is a disease of older people with people being, for the most part, the average patient being in their late 60s and many patients being much older than that. A lot of those older patients, particularly people over the age of 75, and so we find that those tend to be the patients that don't get referred at all, which is quite unfortunate because I think now the treatment landscape has really changed dramatically such that we do have treatments for patients that are over the age of 75 even as long as they're relatively healthy. For younger patients, I think in general, a lot of them do end up getting referred, but there's probably still, unfortunately I don't know the numbers, and I think it depends a little bit on geographically where you are. In a state like Maryland where people are relatively close together, a lot of times those patients will find their way to a referral center because we have relationships with a lot of the community oncologists and it's actually very burdensome and difficult to do the transfusional support and things like that that leukemia patients, AML patients need and so it's easier to have them treated at a referral center where we have good blood bank resources and so forth. But I think it becomes a lot more tricky when you're in a more rural setting and instead of being 100 or 200 miles from the largest local referral center, you're 500 miles from a big referral center, it becomes a whole lot more complicated to get a patient there, to have them get their therapy at a referral center. So I think there's probably some significant differences based on geography in terms of referral patterns.

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