How long does someone live with chronic lymphocytic leukemia? What is the average life expectancy? Is there a cure?

How long does someone live with CLL? What is the average life expectancy? Is there a cure?

It's a chronic disease and in 2022 CLL is not curable with the currently available therapies that we have so it's a diagnosis that patients live alongside for patients who need treatment we do have targeted therapies now and we rarely if ever use chemotherapy so these targeted pills patients who need treatment are able to take over the course of many years in terms of the life expectancy with someone for CLL it really varies by patient but many patients it is a disease of older patients end up dying with the disease rather than from the disease from other medical conditions it's very different from other leukemias particularly the acute leukemias it has to be individualized your treatment plan with your doctor because different patients present differently you know on that Spectrum like I said there's a third of patients who never need treatment and then there's you know a third of patients who need treatment at the time of diagnosis and so it's very different and individual dependent there will be people you know who still have relapse CLL despite treatment with many of the treatments and others who who might not even need a treatment so it's very heterogeneous in terms of how it presents in the individual patient this being a cancer of the immune system there's some other things to keep in mind even if you don't need treatment for your CLL you are immunocompromised compared to someone without CLL in our Clinic we tell patients to be vigilant about vaccinations you know patients with cl might not be able to amount the same response to a vaccination as an individual without live vaccines are not recommended but other vaccines including the covid vaccine vaccination series is recommended for patients with clo the other thing to keep on top of is that by virtue of this being a cancer of the immune system you are increased risk for other secondary cancers including things like skin cancer so we recommend patients see a dermatologist for a skin check once a year and stay up to date on things like colonoscopy mammogram pap smear all the regular age-appropriate cancer screenings chronic lymphocytic leukemia belongs to the category of indolent lymphopoliferative disorders so when we discuss the diagnosis I know that the war is on term of leukemia is basically evocating a a scenario when the debt is closed let's say but this is not the case because this is a chronic Disorder so I wish to focus on the chronicity of this disease meaning that in most cases we can follow the patients over time without requiring treatment Administration and we had made huge progresses in the management of the disease in the last years so even if the disease progresses and requires treatment the life expectancy is greatly improved in this disease and what we are working on is to provide the patient with the same life expectancy a quality of life of age matched population of course we cannot guarantee immortality but the aim of our management of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia is to give them the same life expectancy and a quality of life for people without this diagnosis.