Treatment Locations for Young Adults with Aggressive B-Cell Lymphomas

My name is David Bond. I'm an assistant professor at Ohio State University in the division of hematology. At this meeting, we were excited to present work that we'd done in collaboration with our partners at the Children's Hospital, looking really at the question of young adult patients with mature B-cell lymphomas. These would be non-Hodgkin's lymphomas, including diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and Burkitt lymphoma. Comparing how patients do with treatment at adult versus pediatric centers, because the medical systems have been set up with age 18 being roughly the cutoff where patients transition to an adult center versus a pediatric center, but the treatment for these diseases is actually quite different, particularly for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma at the adult centers versus the pediatric centers. The question that we wanted to look at was, are there differences in the toxicities or the outcomes for patients if they are treated at the pediatric center versus the adult center? We had a cohort of over 150 patients, and we were able to really look at the toxicities, the side effects that occurred with treatment. We saw that at the adult centers, the treatments differed quite substantially, particularly for the diffuse large B-cell lymphoma patients. The side effects also differed with actually less short-term side effects with the adult treatments compared to the pediatric treatments. We did see some other differences, including there was less use of radiation at the pediatric centers and also less instance of peripheral neuropathy, so less patients that had numbness or loss of function in their nerves with treatment. So I think it was important to see these differences in the treatments. We didn't see any difference really in how well the treatments worked, so at least with the number of patients that we had, we didn't see a difference in the efficacy. So the outcomes were actually good overall for both approaches, but we were able to shed light on some of the differences in the side effects encountered. So with that, I thank you for the opportunity to talk with you today, and you can reach out to me at davidbond at osumc.edu with any questions about this project.