How Does COVID Impact CLL Patients?
How Does COVID Impact CLL Patients? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
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Transcript:
Dr. Philip Thompson:
There was a large ISH study published, I think, in Lancet Oncology, recently, from the UK, where they looked at outcomes for patients with cancer. And of course, it was all patients with cancer, not specifically CLL, specifically blood cancers. But I think there were roughly 200 patients with hematologic malignancies.
And the interesting thing that I noticed, there were that patients who had recent chemotherapy, which I might have expected to be a really high-risk feature for a poor outcome, actually didn’t do any worse than patients who hadn’t recently been treated.
By far, the most important predictors of outcome for patients were whether their cancer was controlled or not, number one. And then other co-morbidities that patients had, like lung disease, advanced age, that sort of thing. So, actually, we need to see more data from more – from datasets that have more patients with CLL. But it seemed like the type of treatment mattered less than whether the disease was controlled and what other problems the patient had in terms of predicting their outcome from COVID.
So, I am taking that information with a – we have to, as I said, see more data. But I’m not going to use COVID as a reason not to patients who need treatment.
We may stretch things out somewhat in people where the decision is really well, and maybe you don’t definitely need to treat. But I don’t want to see people get into really severe trouble from their CLL because we’re trying to delay treatment because of COVID. Because that might actually be counterproductive. Because people with very uncontrolled CLL, if they were to get the infection, may actually have inferior outcomes to people whose disease is controlled.
