How quickly does follicular lymphoma progress?

How quickly does follicular lymphoma progress?

In general, it's usually a slower growing disease or does not progress very quickly. It can take years sometimes. There are different forms, though, just as I discussed. So you might have a more aggressive form or a higher grade follicular lymphoma that can grow more quickly.

Most follicular lymphoma is typically a slow growing disease that takes years to progress. How quickly follicular lymphoma progresses really depends on the individual case and to some degree things like the grade and what the previous history is and those kinds of things.

The other thing we think about is whether it transforms or mutates to a more aggressive form of lymphoma, which is usually a large B-cell lymphoma. All of those factors dictate how quickly it progresses.

There are some things that we can use in the clinic, such as laboratory testing, understanding the stage, and the age of the patient, which can be features that help us predict those things. People have started to use even genetic sequencing like some of these next-generation sequencing platforms that help us understand the genes mutated and that are driving the follicular lymphoma.

All of those things are imprecise because there are patients that we find some things that are maybe adverse prognostic markers and the follicular lymphoma behaves growing very slowly. And I've even had many patients that will have a lot of their lymph nodes that may be enlarged at diagnosis or at some point in their disease, actually go away and shrink on their own, which I think gets back to some of the immune ideas of immune environment and some of these things we're working on in terms of treatments.

So that can be very hard to predict. The other thing with lymphoma is there's a lot of variability in cases, even though on average most of these are very slow growing or indolent. We really try to observe or do as little treatment for those folks as possible.