Advanced indolent lymphoma patients can be treated with a rituximab-containing regimen as first-line therapy and, in some cases, skip chemotherapy altogether, a study with 10 years of follow-up data suggests.
Patho/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0
After a median of 10.6 years’ follow-up, almost three-quarters of patients (73%) in the study were alive, and 36% never required chemotherapy.
“This [overall survival] is at least as good as that observed in modern immunochemotherapy trials,” Sandra Lockmer, MD, of Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm and her colleagues reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
The study included 321 patients who were previously untreated and had been enrolled in two randomized clinical trials performed by the Nordic Lymphoma Group. The trials randomized patients to receive either rituximab monotherapy or rituximab combined with interferon alfa-2a. Neither trial used up-front chemotherapy.
Patients included in the follow-up analysis had follicular lymphoma, marginal zone lymphoma, small lymphocytic lymphoma, or indolent lymphoma not otherwise specified.
The overall survival rate at 10 years after trial assignment was 75% and 66% after 15 years. Similarly, the lymphoma-specific survival rate was 81% at 10 years after trial assignment and 77% at 15 years, the researchers reported.
Overall, 117 patients did not require treatment with chemotherapy, but 24 patients were further treated with antibodies and/or radiation. Of the 93 patients who received no additional therapies after frontline treatment, 9 patients died from causes unrelated to their lymphoma.
Among the 237 patients who failed initial treatment, the median time to treatment failure was 1.5 years.
In terms of transformation to aggressive lymphoma, the rate was 2.4%/person-year overall. The cumulative risk of transformation was 20% at 10 years after trial assignment and 24% at 15 years.
The study was funded in part by the Stockholm County Council and by the Nordic Lymphoma Group. The trials analyzed in the study were supported by Roche. Dr. Lockmer reported having no financial disclosures. Her coauthors reported relationships with Novartis, Gilead, Roche, and Takeda, among others.
SOURCE: Lockmer S et al. J Clin Oncol. 2018 Oct 4:JCO1800262. doi: 10.1200/JCO.18.00262.