5/13/01

MEDIA CONTACT: Kristin Weidenbach, (650) 723-6912 or 723-6911.

EARLY BONE MARROW TRANSPLANT PROMOTES LYMPHOMA PATIENT SURVIVAL

STANFORD, Calif. – Stanford researchers have found that striking early and aggressively against a particular kind of lymphoma gives patients a better chance for survival than the gentler, standard approach to treatment.

James M. Malone III, MD, staff physician in the Department of Medicine (hematology), and his colleagues in the bone marrow transplant division analyzed the experience of 45 patients treated for mantle cell lymphoma — a type of non-Hodgkin‘s lymphoma. They found that giving patients a bone marrow transplant to treat the cancer early in the course of their disease gave them a better chance for survival than using a transplant as a last resort after other treatments have failed. Malone is presenting the results of the study on May 13 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

The study was a joint project between physicians at Stanford University Medical Center and at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, Calif. Non-Hodgkin‘s lymphoma is a cancer of the blood‘s B cells. Malignant lymphomas are the most common type of cancer to affect people who are 20 to 40 years of age. Standard chemotherapy treatments are rarely successful for patients with this particular type of non-Hodgkin‘s lymphoma — half of the patients die within three years of diagnosis.

According to Malone, treatment for patients with this kind of lymphoma consists of chemotherapy, sometimes followed by an autologous bone marrow transplant, in which the patient ‘s own blood-forming stem cells are harvested and then returned to the patient after he or she has received high doses of chemotherapy and radiation to kill the cancer cells. "Autologous transplantation has been utilized in these patients for some time, but it has been unclear if it is beneficial, and if so, in which patients," said Malone.

He and his colleagues studied 21 patients with mantle cell lymphoma who had bone marrow transplants at Stanford and 24 patients who had bone marrow transplants at the City of Hope between January 1993 and December 2000. They found that 94 percent of patients who received their bone marrow transplant early, when their cancer was first in remission, survived for at least three years, whereas less than 60 percent of patients who were transplanted later, after their cancer had recurred on one or two occasions, survived to three years. The researchers also found that the cancer was less likely to return in those patients transplanted early.

"People don‘t like to use a ‘harsh’ treatment, like a bone marrow transplant, early. They like to use ‘gentle‘ therapies first," said Malone. "But we found that doing the transplant early had a significant impact on survival."

5/13/01 - kw - earlyBMT