CLL Awareness

Ryan W. Jacobs, MD

Jacobs reports numerous ties to industry.
December 06, 2023
2 min watch
Save

VIDEO: What survivorship means to patients with CLL

Transcript

Editor’s note: This is an automatically generated transcript. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

That's an interesting question. If it's a patient that's on indefinite therapy, you know, there's not really a "traditional survivorship," clinical picture, these patients are still coming in routinely to be checked on while they continue therapy. There's some interesting data at the American Society of Hematology meeting coming up, you know, just here in a few weeks that would indicate what we were thinking, that, you know, when you start a patient with a BTK inhibitor as their first line of treatment, there's going to be a good chance that they're going to go maybe 10 years or so on treatment and have progression-free benefit from that. So that's more just actively following patients, but for the patients that go on time to find therapy, and that's going to be these days, you know, venetoclax based treatment with obinutuzumab, these are ones that, you know, I think what survivorship looks like as a 6 month check-in. We try not to do CAT scans for just screening purposes. We try to avoid that, we try to just use scans if we need them. I check labs, I do a physical exam, I talk to my patients. I see if there's any worrisome findings and then not necessarily a part of clinical practice guidelines, but something that I found helpful is I do follow minimal residual disease in my venetoclax treat of patients, and that usually gives me an idea, around a couple of years ahead of time before I ever see the CLL show up in their basic blood work.