After I am diagnosed with CLL, are there any lifestyle factors I can change to improve my survival rate?
Usually when I ask patients what to do, I say leave the worry for me. Live your life. The whole idea for therapy is how can we minimize the burden of your disease and your treatments? You can keep going with your life. The reality is that in the majority of [the] time, patients can continue functioning, working, doing their things while they receive their therapy, there are few things that they can do. One of the silver linings for me of COVID is understanding better how we get sick, right? So knowing that, yes, you can go to a gathering, but just be careful. Just don’t be close to people who are having the sniffles or just wash your hands and if you're sick, don't panic. There are always ways that we can fix it. So. And to me, it's really changing that don't put the CLL as the focus of your life from now on. Just understand that you have a life to live. You have a family to enjoy. You have work to do, and CLL will be there and we will take care of it to make sure they can continue living. So lifestyle is: continue to have a healthy lifestyle. Eat well; balanced diets. All these miracle diets don't work. So it's really a balanced diet to make sure you're well nourished, drinking plenty of fluids, being well-hydrated, go to the sun. But be careful. CLL has a little bit of a greater risk of skin cancers. So important. Using sunscreen, being careful with the sun exposure Wear a seatbelt, and really try to keep a healthy lifestyle. Don't smoke, [do] exercise. Those are the best things that you can do in your life. Whether you have CLL that is under treatment or CLL that is just be monitored. Yeah so CLL is ultimately the last kind of diagnosis or arbitrary made by counting the number of these clonal cells and arbitrarily we have these 5000 cut-off number below 5000 is that what we call a precursor state. It's called monoclonal B cell lymphocytosis. These are clonal cells that are there, but they don't meet that number. That’s an asymptomatic period, and after that you can still have CLL over 5000 clonal B cells, but not requiring treatment like I mentioned before. During that time, there have been studies on, you know, using medications to treat patients. And obviously because we're treating we can increase the survival. However, what we call the overall survival has not been demonstrated to be, you know, favorable if we intervene early. There are studies being conducted in patients who have the higher risk CLL based on what we call the molecular characteristics of the cells to see if that is different. But overall, still, we monitor these patients. What lifestyle interventions patients can have during that period of time to decrease the progression. I will just tell, you know, my patients that they just have to have a healthy lifestyle. There's no specific, you know, lifestyle intervention that has shown to, you know, prevent the further development of CLL. But you just always encourage patients to have a, you know, healthy lifestyle and diet activity in this exercise as well. And to be honest, the most beneficial intervention is actually continuing monitoring with your provider periodically because we have to detect when patients require treatment, especially those who carry these high risk features, which are the molecular characteristics of the genomics behind the cancer cells— The B cells.
HealthTree • January 9, 2024
