Addressing Vulnerabilities in Follicular Lymphoma
What are support methods for follicular lymphoma patients with more vulnerability? Expert Dr. Brad Kahl from Washington University School of Medicine discusses approaches to follicular lymphoma care of older patients to help guard against side effects, disease complications, and infections.
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Transcript:
Lisa Hatfield:
And another question, which patients are considered the most vulnerable when it comes to follicular lymphoma and why, and what measures can be taken to better support these populations in terms of treatment and care? And I’m not sure if they’re talking about different age groups or ethnic groups or geographic groups like rural versus more urban areas, but if you can speak maybe too general terms to answer that question, that would be great.
Dr. Brad Kahl:
Yeah, right. Well, the first thing that comes to mind are older patients. Older patients are always more challenging to take through cancer therapies. The older patients are more fragile. They don’t tolerate the treatments quite as well. They don’t have the physiologic reserve. They’re more susceptible to complications and infections. So I always think when we have older patients that need treatment in follicular lymphoma, the doctor has to be extra, extra careful, sort of the Goldilocks principle.
You don’t want the treatment too hot and you don’t want it too cold, too hot, it might work great, but you might get unacceptable side effects too cold, maybe no side effects, but not enough activity against the disease. So we’re always trying to get that patient the best remission we can get them, but doing the least amount of harm along the way.
So I think that takes a little bit of art, a little bit of experience to figure out how to get your older more fragile patients through follicular lymphoma therapy. And then I think the whole idea of patients who live in rural areas, that can often be challenging too, because they may be hours and hours away from medical care. So if they do have a complication of treatment, an infection, for example, it can be challenging to get them the care they need in a quick amount of time. So when I have patients who I know live way out in the country, far away from our center, I just, we always give them a card, it’s got our phone number and I’m like, you feel like something’s going wrong, call us. I don’t care if it’s 2 in the morning, you call us.
It’s not your job to figure out what’s going wrong. That’s our job. It’s just your job to describe to us what you’re experiencing and then we’ll figure out over the phone whether we want you to drive the three hours to come see us or whether we think you just need to go to the closest place, which might be 30 minutes away. So at least you’re in the hands of some medical professionals. And then they can call us with an update on what they’re noticing, what the tests are saying. So taking care of patients who live far away from the medical center poses some additional challenges.
Lisa Hatfield:
And that’s a great takeaway for patients. If you have a question, call your provider. They can help take the stress away from making that decision yourself. So thank you.
