VIDEO: Conditions to watch for in patients with DLBCL

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In some situations, neuropathy is one thing that's very common with some of the treatments. Most of this is low-grade neuropathy, which is just tingling in hands and feet, and sometimes some numbness. This comes from either the vincristine, or the polatuzumab. We can run into issues with reduced cardiac function related to the anthracycline that's utilized in this patient population. Some people develop joint aches and pains or chronic viral infections, due to low immunoglobulins related to the rituximab, plus the chemotherapy. And I would say in a lot of our patients, unfortunately, you know, anxiety is probably the most common sort of thing that comes after treatment, just because of the fear of the cancer coming back. The promising thing, at least for the last part, is that we know that if most patients can keep a remission for 24 months, it is very unlikely that their cancer's going to come back. So that does provide some big relief and removes a huge sub-burden off these patients as they're able to hopefully start reliving their lives as they normally would if they had not come down with this diagnosis in that situation.

Patients who have to get transplants, obviously, there's some concerns of secondary cancers that come thereafter. They were CAR T after the initial concern of cytokine release syndrome and neurological toxicity. With ICANS, we really look into infections, and prolonged cytopenias, which require growth factor, and transfusions, as some of the more long-term complications from our treatments. Hopefully as we move along, more of our treatments will become a bit more limited as far as side effects that they cause to our patients, especially long-term side effects. But, again, in this situation, I think we're still trying to optimize a lot of these treatments to limit some of the long-term side effects. And some of the ones just can't be avoided, especially when we talk about the front line setting, because of the importance of the anthracycline. And all we can do is monitor, and then hopefully use our cardio oncologist to help recover some of the cardiac function in these patients.