What other supportive therapies may I be receiving in addition to AML treatment? The supportive care for AML is, I would say, just as important as the treatment of the AML itself, in part because the treatments may have side effects, but even outside of the treatments, patients with AML generally have some symptoms related to their disease. Some of the key supportive medications include those to help treat and prevent symptoms such as nausea. So there are a lot of different anti-nausea medications. Some of the treatments may cause constipation or diarrhea, and so we may provide stool softeners or actually anti-diarrheals. One of the other key areas of supportive care include the prevention of infection, and so it's very common to be put on multiple different anti-infectious agents. These include potentially antivirals, antibacterials, and antifungals, and these are really very important to help patients get through the treatment safely. A couple other key domains of supportive care, one is transfusion support. So most patients with AML have low blood counts, and if they don't, then the treatment usually results in low blood counts, at least until patients start to respond, and so part of the supportive care is ensuring that patients are having labs checked frequently and that they are receiving supportive transfusions as needed. The last domain of supportive care, patients with AML have a lot of symptoms, and in many cases the disease is life-threatening, and so I think increasingly it's become common to involve a palliative care team early on to help manage some of these symptoms and in some cases to help prepare for what patients would want at the end of their life. So nausea, diarrhea management, transfusion support, infection prevention, and potentially palliative care.
HealthTree • November 16, 2022