How long does someone live with follicular lymphoma?
So some large retrospective studies show that when we match patients with follicular lymphoma to a patient with follicular lymphoma with the same age and sex, their life expectancy is actually similar. So technically, life expectancy for this patient should be the same as the general population, again, age and sex matched.
There are, though, some specific subgroups that may not do as well. So if patients with follicular lymphoma require treatment and they received chemotherapy and they relapse within 24 months from an additional chemo, and this population is typically identified as PD 24 or progression on disease within 24 months of treatment. We know that these patients, unfortunately, will tend to live less. And these are the patients where we try to look the most into clinical trials to try to change that.
So in general, there's two things I think of. The prognosis for follicular lymphoma patients from diagnosis is usually measured in years, if not decades. And there's actually publications that if you look at folks diagnosed with follicular lymphoma and you compare them to what you'd expect in terms of survival or longevity, it is very similar in most patients to what you'd expect.
And so we kind of factor that into thinking about when we start treatment, how aggressive we are with treatment, how we sequence treatment, how we follow patients. That being said, there are some follicular lymphoma patients that have a follicular lymphoma that is very aggressive. And even though it looks exactly the same as any other low grade follicular lymphoma under the microscope on biopsy, it can behave aggressively. And we often have to do multiple different treatments and look toward newer treatments, including some of the newer immunotherapies and stem cell transplant for those patients.
HealthTree • July 22, 2024
