What tests will I need to do for my follicular lymphoma?

What tests will I need to do for my follicular lymphoma and how often?

Yeah, so that really depends on the situation and where a patient is, what their diagnosis is. Common things that we do, you know, say at diagnosis would be lab tests, things like blood counts. Are there complications related to the blood, you know, either high or low white blood cell count, anemia, low platelet count? That can be important to deciding, you know, what's the status of a patient's follicular lymphoma.

Other things we often look at is as function of other organs like liver, kidney, heart. Many of those can be done with blood tests. And that can also give us a sense of, you know, this patient's doing well or there's some concern with some of those. There's blood test, other things that frequently come up beyond blood tests or things like what's called computed tomography or CT scans or PET scans, which was also known as positron emission tomography.

So these are basically, you know, two-dimensional cuts, you know, or looks inside of a patient to define where in the body and what the nodes may be, what you know, how are the other organs like the lungs or heart or liver, kidneys, doing kind of things like staging oftentimes or will do things like PET CT scans. It can give us a little bit of a sense of how aggressive the patient's on file, including in this scenario Follicular lymphoma may be. And also that can help us decide whether we think there may be something additional going on, like a more aggressive component to the lymphoma, because often the treatments and certainly the decision whether to just observe the patient versus not can be very different if we're concerned that there may be a more aggressive component to the lymphoma.

So what test do you need fulfilling to the lymphoma? Again, the most important test is going to be a biopsy to confirm the diagnosis and then some sort of imaging, usually a PET scan or a CT scan, to determine your stage, how far advanced it is. We do typical blood tests to look for certain types of infections. We will check your blood counts and also check your chemistries, liver function, kidney function. These are all important when determining treatment.

Other testing as far as how often you need to be tested, it really depends on whether or not you're actively treating your lymphoma. For example, if you have a follicular lymphoma that's not causing problems and your oncologist tells you we don't need to treat it right now, you might be coming in once every three months for bloodwork, and they might do a PET scan or a CT scan every six months or once a year. It kind of depends on how you're doing.

If you are on active treatment, though, you will likely be seen more frequently. They will be doing blood tests every few weeks or once a month, depending on what treatment you're on. And then you will do imaging every few months after so many what we call cycles of treatment to make sure it's working.