Tips for Determining the Best CLL Treatment for You
Tips for Determining the Best CLL Treatment for You from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
CLL expert Dr. Javier Pinilla-Ibarz explains how a treatment regimen is chosen, stressing the important role that patient preference plays in making a decision. Want more information? Download the Program Resource Guide here.
Dr. Javier Pinilla-Ibarz is the Lymphoma Section Head and Director of Immunotherapy in the malignant hematology department at Moffitt Cancer Center. More about this expert here.
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Transcript:
Patricia Murphy:
What are the things that you’re thinking about when you’re considering treatment for your patients, when you’re making those decisions?
Dr. Javier Pinilla:
Well, I think it’s important to really notice and to really understand my patient, is that we need to provide education. We need to provide education, and obviously, every – many, many patients ask me, “Doctor, what I should do?” Right?
But I think it’s very important for me to understand what is the goals of every patient, right? Age, comorbid condition, way of life, people like to travel versus staying in the same place. So, I try to really educate about the options because we are very lucky that we have multiple options. We also understand – so, what is gonna be the difficulty is to really get therapy A versus therapy B and how much control or monitoring they require, and finally also, as mentioned before, to try to customize therapies for different patients.
I always say that – we discuss in the beginning that not everyone with CLL requires therapy at the beginning. However, when people require therapy, not everyone requires therapy for the same reason. Some people may require therapy because they are anemic, okay, extreme anemia. Why? Because their bone marrow cannot really produce enough red cells or even platelets. Why? Because they is full of CLL cells.
So, those patients in my opinion, they can really do very well with strategies as BCL-2 inhibitor in combination and alone. Why? Because these drugs is able to truly and very, very efficaciously really eliminate the CLL.
So, we go into another scenario. Patient with very high, bulky lymph nodes in the neck, axillary and abdominal, for example, with enlarged spleen who may have very, very severe B-cell symptoms. We note that we cannot apply anything. There’s no doubt that introduction of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase inhibitor or even – is extremely successful in reducing the symptomatology very fast and shrinking the lymph nodes in a very short period of time. So, again, I would say that it’s black and blue or like a black and white and – different.
Patricia Murphy:
Black and white.
Dr. Javier Pinilla:
Black and white. Thank you. So, but the truth is different patients may require different strategies, and obviously, patients’ preference are really, really important.
Patient may come back to be in therapy for life, maybe patient maybe don’t care. Patient may really, really, really want specifically shorter therapy. So, I think we need to really understand that in the options and start to work with them, also depending on the presentation on the needs for therapy.
