Burkitt’s and Aggressive Lymphomas

Angioimmunoblastic T-cell – pro

Angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma (AILD) is considered a variety of T-cell lymphoma, which usually occurs in adults. Patients present with profound lymphadenopathy, fever, night sweats, weight loss, skin rash, a positive Coomb's test, and polyclonal hypergammaglobulinemia. It is quite rare and no standrd approach has beend efined. Angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma was formerly called angioimmunoblastic lymphadenopathy with dysproteinemia. Characterized

Read more
T Cell Lymphoma – pro

Lay Summary: Not much is known about NK1 T lymphomas. This post briefly describes what is known. This kind of lymphoma tend to be indolent but not all that much is known about hatural history of these neoplasms and some patients do poorly. Patients with natural killer T (NK/T) -cell lymphomas have poor survival outcome, and for this condition there is no optimal therapy. A recent review found that following treatments tend to be used: Patients received

Read more
Autologous stem cell transplantation for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma – pro

Lay Summary: Autologous stem cell transplantation is standard for relapsed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.   Patients with aggressive and intermediate non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) treated at first diagnosis with polychemotherapy alone or combined chemoradiotherapy can achieve high response rates . However, patients with relapsed or progressive disease still have a poor prognosis. High-dose chemotherapy (HDCT) followed by autologous stem cell transplantation

Read more
ASCT for Burkitt’s – pro

Standard doxorubicin-based combination chemotherapy, such as CHOP, frequently induces remissions of short duration. In an attempt to obtain durable remissions, high-dose therapy (HDT) with autologous stem-cell support was given in a few centers for patients who were in remission upon CHOP-like induction therapy. In the last decade, several pediatric groups have obtained impressive results for BL- and B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia patients

Read more
Umbilical cord stem cells – pro

Lay summary: Cord stem cells have been shown to be equivalent to other allogeneic cells for transplantation in leukemia but not yet for other diagnoses. Cord blood transplantation is a fairly recent but rapidly becoming established technique for transplnatation in leukemia. The first unrelated cord blood transplantations were performed in children. The first 25 unrelated cord blood transplantations were reported in 1996. Since then a number of reports

Read more
Salvage regimens for non- Hodgkin’s lymphoma – pro

Lay Summary: I discuss salvage regimens for aggressive of intermediate relapsed or refractory lymphoma. Aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is difficult to handle once it relapses or becomes refractory to chemotherapy. Various second or third line chemotherapies, which are called salvage chemotherapy, were developed without promising results. Improvement in efficacy by adding relatively new agent, rituximab, to chemotherapy is now widely accepted in

Read more
PET to”fish” for a diagnosis – pro

Lay Summary: PET should not be used to "fish" for a diagnosis. On the other hand, when a pathological diagnosis is already established, PET can be useful for follow-up, staging and reassessment after therapy. PET scanning is an excellent modality to assess tumor size and metabolic activity and it is coming into wider use as supporting data becomes available for various tumor types. It can be used to distinguish benign and malignant tissues once a

Read more
Donor Lymphocyte Infusions (DLI) for CLL – pro

Lay Summary: DLI is well studied in chronic myelogenous leukemia but less so in other hematological conditions. DLI induces complete remissions in the majority of patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) in early-stage relapse and in less than 30% of patients with relapsed acute leukemia, myelodysplasia, and multiple myeloma. DLI-induced remissions of chronic phase CML are durable, but as many as half of patients with other diseases ultimately

Read more
Treating biphenotypic leukemia – pro

A minority of acute leukemias have features characteristic of both the myeloid and lymphoid lineages and for this reason are designated mixed-lineage, hybrid or biphenotypic acute leukemias (BAL). There have been difficulties in establishing whether BAL represents a distinct clinico-biological entity due to a lack of objective criteria for distinguishing BAL from acute myeloid leukemias (AML) or acute lymphoblastic leukemias (ALL) with aberrant expression

Read more
Hyper CVAD for Burkitts – pro

Standard doxorubicin-based combination chemotherapy, such as CHOP, frequently induces remissions of short duration. The overall CR rate is 915 and induction-therapy mortality was low (6%). In one review the estimated 5-year CR rate was 38% and the estimated 5-year survival rate was 39%. These results were achieved despite broad entrance criteria (no exclusions by age, performance status, organ dysfunction, or infection status at the time of diagnosis).

Read more