What Do Patients Need to Know About DLBCL and COVID Vaccines?
What Do Patients Need to Know About DLBCL and COVID Vaccines? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
DLBCL treatment can lower a patient’s immunity. Dr. Kami Maddocks explains current options to help patients protect themselves from COVID and other viruses.
Dr. Kami Maddocks is a hematologist who specializes in treating patients with B-cell malignancies at the The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – The James. Learn more about Dr. Maddocks.
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Transcript:
Katherine:
Do you recommend that patients continue getting vaccines? For COVID, for flu?
Dr. Maddocks:
Yes. So, particularly, when you look at lymphomas, this is a cancer of the immune system. The cancer can make your immune system compromise the treatment. While you’re getting treated makes your immune system compromised. And even for a period after treatment, your immune system can be compromised. So, it’s important to protect yourselves against infection. Sometimes the efficacy of vaccines in the middle of treatment might not be as good as not being on treatment.
But that said, there’s no data that the vaccines are harmful. You do have to be careful about live vaccines when you’re under treatment, and you should ask your doctor about not the typical vaccines, of course. But I think that it’s very important to take every step that patients can, to try to prevent themselves from battling something in addition to them already undergoing treatments, their body’s already going through a lot.
And so, anything that we can do or they can do to help prevent them from dealing with more than they already are, I think is important.
