Tag Archive for: combination chemotherapy

How Can Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma Treatment Symptoms Be Managed?

How Can Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma Patients Manage Treatment Symptoms? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

How can diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) treatment symptoms be managed? Expert Dr. Nirav Shah from the Medical College of Wisconsin explains common symptoms and side effects that patients experience and how they can help in managing their care along with their team.

Dr. Nirav Shah is an Associate Professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Learn more about Dr. Shah.

[ACT]IVATION TIP:

“…call us. Let us know what’s going on. We can’t help you with your symptoms if we’re not aware, and we don’t mind those phone calls because we want to help patients through that journey.”

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How Is Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma Explained to a Newly Diagnosed Patient?

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When Should CAR-T Therapy Be Considered for Relapsed/Refractory DLBCL Patients

Is Stem Cell Transplantation Still a Treatment Option for Some DLBCL Patients

Is Stem Cell Transplantation Still a Treatment Option for Some DLBCL Patients


Transcript:

Lisa Hatfield:

So, Dr. Shah, newly diagnosed DLBCL patients, they come in and typically, you would most likely prescribe a chemotherapy regimen, and then maybe down the road they may see something like CAR-T therapy. Can you explain what type of symptoms they may or may not have, and how they can manage those symptoms and maybe even a tip on who to call when they experience symptoms? 

Dr. Nirav N. Shah:

Yeah, it’s a great question, Lisa. So the front-line regimen for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma in 2023 is a combination chemotherapy regimen. The good news is we’ve gotten so much better at delivering these drugs in a safe and efficacious manner, we’re really good at preventing those horrible things that we think about when we watch movies of people vomiting all the time and being nauseous and losing weight. We have really good antiemetics, we develop a program to deal with nausea or vomiting should it occur, and escalate our treatments to prevent it in those patients that are more sensitive to the chemotherapy drugs.

That being said, it’s still chemotherapy. And so people do feel the side effects. I think the hardest side effect for a lot of people to endure is hair loss, these combination chemotherapy do cause hair loss, and then that often is even a little bit harder for women, just given the stigma for hair and how important that is to some of our female patients, and so these are challenges that I try to discuss with patients to help them anticipate. Again, we have lots of different services at our institution, we have a wig service, a place for people to go to find options on how to deal with that.

The biggest medical symptoms that I tell people that everybody experiences is just fatigue. We’re putting poison in your body to kill a cancer. We’re doing it for a good reason, but that just wipes people out. Most patients will not have the energy, the appetite, the drive that they normally have when they’re feeling well. And again, for the most part, that’s short-lived, but for some patients that can even last three to six months after completing their chemotherapy regimen. There’s lots of individual side effects that I warn them about, the one that I am most concerned about for my patients is infection, because chemotherapy doesn’t only kill the part of the immune system, the lymphoma, it can also weaken the immune system, a part of the immune system that is there to protect you from infection.

And so we tell them to monitor for fevers, and if they’re not feeling well to call us in. We provide our patients numbers for 24/7 contact. So we have a number that they can call to, and no matter when they call, they’ll be able to get either an on-call provider or the team if it’s during the daytime, to be able to help them with whatever issue or symptoms that they’re having. And so my activation point to my patients is, call us. Let us know what’s going on. We can’t help you with your symptoms if we’re not aware, and we don’t mind those phone calls because we want to help patients through that journey. 


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What Are the Latest Acute Myeloid Leukemia Therapies?

What Are the Latest Acute Myeloid Leukemia Therapies? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

What are the latest treatments in acute myeloid leukemia (AML)? Dr. Catherine Lai from Penn Medicine discusses the increase in available AML treatments. Learn about combination therapies and treatment options for patients with IDH1, IDH2, and FLT3 mutations.

[ACT]IVATION TIP from Dr. Lai: “Ask your physician and your oncologist when you’re talking with them about what all the newest therapies are and what would be specifically the best treatment for their specific leukemia with respect to the different mutations.”

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How Can We Address Disparities in AML Among Diverse Populations?

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What Promising AML Treatments Are Available for Newly Diagnosed Patients

What Promising AML Treatments Are Available for Newly Diagnosed Patients?

Transcript: 

Art:

Dr. Lai, for newly diagnosed AML patients, what are the latest available therapies?

Dr. Catherine Lai:

That’s a great question. The last, I would say, a handful of years have really seen a dramatic increase in the number of new treatment options for AML patients, specifically since 2017, the FDA has approved 10 new drugs for AML, that’s both for patients who are newly diagnosed and in the relapsed refractory setting.

And so what I would say is that we break our patients into two different categories in terms of being able to tolerate intensive chemotherapy versus non-intensive chemotherapy, and as well as looking at specifically targeted mutations that patients may have so that we can better understand the disease but also treat these patients more specifically to try to maximize efficacy while minimizing toxicity. 

And so specifically, I would say for patients who have FLT3 mutations, there are drugs such as midostaurin (Rydapt) and gilteritinib (Xospata), there are drugs for mutations in IDH1 and IDH2, enasidenib (Idhifa) and ivosidenib (Tibsovo) and recently, or in December of  2022, olutasidenib (Rezlidhia) was also approved for IDH1-mutated patients as well.

We have a general targeted agent that’s an oral chemotherapy that probably has made the biggest difference in how we treat patients called venetoclax (Venclexta), and that’s used in combination with azacitidine (Onureg) or decitabine (Dacogen), or low dose cytarabine (Cytosar).

Although most commonly in the United States, we use azacitidine or decitabine in combination with the venetoclax, and that I think is really what I’d say has been practice changing for the most part, in terms of both increasing the complete remission rates as well as the overall survival for these patients. So I would say there are a lot of new drugs. It is all very exciting.

The biggest activation tip in terms of takeaways is to ask your physician and your oncologist when you’re talking with them about what all the newest therapies are and what would be specifically the best treatment for their specific leukemia with respect to the different mutations.

Art:

Okay. Dr. Lai, what are the latest approaches to combination chemotherapy to treat AML?

Dr. Catherine Lai:

So, the latest approaches for combination chemotherapy would be in the combination of a hypomethylating agent, azacitidine or decitabine in combination with venetoclax. This is the most practice-changing combination that has been approved since 2017 to 2018, and now more recently, what’s been happening is now looking, so we call that a doublet, and now it’s been looking at…what we’ve been studying is now whether or not triplets are more effective, when we do have triple combinations, we do see an increase in toxicity and so on, we haven’t come up with the right algorithm in terms of what that exact formula should be, but often I think about it in kind of a three-fold in terms of wins the right time, what’s the right combination, and how do we see in the drugs, and I think the sequencing is the biggest thing that we don’t yet know, and how do we combine the two different..two different drugs in a way, and how do we give them in a way that will maximize efficacy, will minimize the toxicity, so as an example is, Do we give two drugs for a specific period of time, and then after some determined time point, do we…

And change it to a different set of combination of drugs to make sure that patients are getting the most benefit of the drugs, and we don’t know that yet, but I think that that’s where the general direction…where the landscape is heading, so the activation tip I would take home from this is just to have a conversation with your physician about potential clinical trials and how combination therapies are being used. 

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