ASH Video

Patient Power is at the ASH Conference, and provides a nice video summarizing what they think are some of the biggest stories in Lymphoma this year.

(I've featured video from Patient Power before. It's an organization that does a very good job of empowering patients to understand their disease and take control of their treatment -- or at least not leave it all in someone else's hands.)

This video features an interview with Dr. Anas Younes, a very well-known lymphoma expert from MD Anderson in Houston. For the first part of the video, he discusses some new treatments for Hodgkin's Lymphoma, ad then about another type of NHL, anaplastic large cell lymphoma.

But the relevant and interesting discussion comes at about the 7 minute mark, where he discusses the subject of watching and waiting. Dr. Younes thinks that after this ASH meeting, watching and waiting will be "dead" -- there is evidence that giving Rituxan early on will yield better results than W & W, but with minimal toxicity (see the Lympho Bob entry from a couple of weeks ago on this subject).

So maybe I'm among the last generation of patients to go through W & W as an initial treatment option. Which is kind of cool, I guess, if 20 years from now some fNHL patient says to me, "What? You didn't treat? You waited 2 full years when Rituxan was available? How barbaric!"

Even better -- maybe in 20 years, the whole idea of fNHL will be history.

Anyway, here's the video. And check out the other video at the bottom of the page, where Andrew Schorr, Patient Power founder, reviews the first day of the ASH conference. Lots of nice stuff there, too.