How is graft versus host disease diagnosed and monitored in acute myeloid leukemia patients?

How is graft versus host disease diagnosed and monitored in acute myeloid leukemia patients?

Chronic GvHD and really acute as well are both clinical diagnoses. They come from having the right constellation of symptoms and oftentimes, the right tests to rule out other things that can manifest with the same set of symptoms. We do a lot of biopsies when it's amenable, and that histopathologic findings of certain immune cells infiltrating into the tissues, causing, certain findings that a pathologist will point out to us is helpful, but it is not required to make the diagnosis.

How you present, how you're feeling, the absence of other things that could kind of do the same thing, plus or minus some biopsy data.

So once the diagnosis of chronic GvHD has been made, it depends on sort of what tissue or organ we're talking about.

But we would certainly continue to monitor with clinical exams, laboratory work. There are some organs, for instance, if we're talking about skin or fascia or muscles, where things like range of movement matters and we can measure particular sort of, activities that you're able to do, and then there's a fairly complex grading system where, you know, you check off kind of what you find to keep an eye, they get a score and you keep an eye on how that is going over time.