SOHO 2021 | CTCL management: the challenges faced by clinicians

The challenges faced by clinicians and the management of these patients are many. The first thing is a cutaneous T-cell lymphoma is not one entity. It’s many different conditions, some of which are quite indolent, some of which are extremely aggressive. A clinician that doesn’t encounter these entities very commonly may have a lot of difficulty parsing out the differences, and even knowing that some of these entities exist to be honest. That would be the first challenge. Going along with that, if you have not had a lot of experience with different entities, and there are diagnostic complexities to the different entities, so that you might not even have a clear idea what the diagnosis is for a given patient, it makes it that much more difficult to select the appropriate treatment for a given patient. I think that there are a tremendous amount of complexities in these situations with people with cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, and it’s very difficult, especially difficult for clinicians that aren’t focused in this area really to choose what the best treatment might be for their patient, and to really understand what the outlook is for a particular patient.