Nice Presentation

This link will bring you to a nice presentation called "What is Lymphoma? A Clinician's Perspective" by Dr. Stephanie Gregory. It was recorded at the Lymphoma Research Foundation conference last October. Power point slides and audio.

As the title implies, it's a pretty basic overview of the different types of lymphomas, their causes, diagnoses, and treatment possibilities. Standard stuff for these presentations -- I've posted a few of them the last two and a half years or so.

Several things that stood out for me, though:

• She mentions the FLIPI, the prosnostic index for Follicular NHL. I've started to write about FLIPI a few times, but I always stop myself, because it's too easy to use the FLIPI incorrectly: as a way of predicting how the disease will affect an individual patient. That's not the point of the Index; it's supposed to be used as a tool for the doctor to decide how to consider treatment options. So, like all numbers and statistics associated with NHL, I ignore FLIPIs. (Of course, I also secretly and briefly cheer that my FLIPI is really low, but then I move on.)
• I'd never seen the statistics that she put out for Watching and Waiting. According to Dr. Gregory, 39% of people who watch and wait will go 4 years before needing treatment, and 19% will go for 10 years. That's pretty amazing to me; nowhere near that percentage of watch-and-waiters in my support group has gone that long. I have heard that anything over a year is "a good sign," since it means things are growing slowly, so I put myself in the Happy Group with my two year wait.
• She rushed through the section on treatment, but it was nice to be reminded that there have been excellent results with chemo + RIT, where chemo is given for fewer than the normal number of rounds (which is 6), and then Zevalin or Bexxar is administered to clean up the rest of what is there.
• I also liked her charts of treatments that will possibly be approved for use for NHL in the next 5 or 6 years. She listed 15 treatments now in clinical trials. A couple of them have already been approved, and not all of them will be approved for Follicular NHL, but even another 3 or 4 more weapons in the arsenal would be great, especially since newer treatments tend to be more targeted, which means, ideally, more effective but less toxic.

So, as always, there's something new to learn, and something new to be hopeful about.