Older Patients Experience Improved QOL with NHL Treatments

My name is Patrick Connor Johnson, and I'm at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center where I specialize in the treatment of lymphoma and in administering a type of treatment called CAR T-cell therapy. I'm presenting work at this conference today focused on the clinical outcomes and patient reported outcomes of older adults receiving treatment for aggressive lymphomas. As a way of background, lymphomas can come in indolent or slow growing forms or aggressive forms which are fast growing. Aggressive lymphomas are scary diseases because without treatment they are fatal or they take lives. But actually we have the potential to cure these lymphomas with various treatments including chemotherapy. However, chemotherapy comes with risk of side effects and believe it or not, there's very little data examining patient reported outcomes like quality of life when going through treatment for a new diagnosis of an aggressive lymphoma. And this is especially important as you get older because that can be particularly a higher risk time for having side effects from chemotherapy compared to if you're younger. So in this study we took patients 65 years or older. The oldest patient was 99 years of age and we followed them over time from the time of their diagnosis all the way out to six months after completing treatment for their cancer. And we looked at multiple time points and asked them to report to us what's your quality of life both before starting treatment and then at multiple time points throughout the treatment with the last time point being six months after treatment. We also examined some other patient reported outcomes such as anxiety, depression and physical symptom burden mostly from the cancer is what we suspect. Over time we found that in this group of patients actually quality of life improved. On average quality of life improved all the way out to the six month time point and similarly rates of depression and rates of anxiety and rates of physical symptom burden all decreased as patients went through treatment. So even though in general you might think that going through chemotherapy though it is of course an arduous task even in older adults we found in general that we can expect quality of life and other symptoms to improve over time when going through therapy. Now I'll note that we also looked at something called frailty which means taking a look at on how impaired patients are whether that be from other medical problems or from the lymphoma itself. And we actually found benefits in quality of life even for patients that were considered frail by metrics that we use in medicine. So my takeaway from this study so far is I think it's encouraging to see that we can have improvements in quality of life and other important patient reported outcomes across different groups of patients including in patients who are older adults receiving these therapies. So with this study and our work we hope to try and continue to improve the patient reported outcomes experienced by those undergoing treatment and to try to identify the patients who actually don't have their quality of life improved with these types of treatments so that we can figure out ways to either improve that or actually have them receive different treatments altogether if their quality of life is not improving with these therapies. Thank you.