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ASH 2024 | The importance of secondary cancer screening programs in Hodgkin lymphoma survivors
Anna Sureda, MD, PhD, Catalan Institute of Oncology, Duran I Reynals Hospital, Barcelona, Spain, highlights the importance of secondary cancer screening programs in classical Hodgkin lymphoma (cHL) survivors, particularly in young patients who are cured with first-line treatment strategies. Dr Sureda emphasizes that these programs are crucial for detecting secondary malignancies early and preventing late mortality, a significant concern in this population. This interview took place at the 66th ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition, held in San Diego, CA.
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Transcript (AI-generated)
Well, first of all, classical Hodgkin’s lymphoma is a disease of the young. So basically, the first peak in terms of incidence is around 25, 30 years of age. And then we have the second peak, which is in the elderly population of patients between 60 and 65.
The other important thing to take into consideration is that first-line treatment strategies are curing a high proportion of patients with classical Hodgkin lymphoma, even patients who are being diagnosed with advanced-stage disease...
Well, first of all, classical Hodgkin’s lymphoma is a disease of the young. So basically, the first peak in terms of incidence is around 25, 30 years of age. And then we have the second peak, which is in the elderly population of patients between 60 and 65.
The other important thing to take into consideration is that first-line treatment strategies are curing a high proportion of patients with classical Hodgkin lymphoma, even patients who are being diagnosed with advanced-stage disease. And this is why, taking into consideration that we know that patients with a first cancer have a higher probability of developing a second cancer, and secondly, patients who have been treated with chemotherapy plus or minus radiotherapy also have a higher incidence of developing secondary malignancies. In these patients, who constitute a young population of patients and who are highly cured with first-line treatment strategies, it’s very important to implement programs to follow these patients and to be able to detect early secondary malignancies and basically to be able to modify the higher incidence of secondary malignancies by specific programs.
And I would say that probably, talking about Europe, there are countries where these long-term survivorship programs have been better developed. And I know quite a lot of them in the UK. There are other countries where these long-term survivorship programs are not so well developed, but they really represent a big unmet medical need because, of course, maximizing the use of additional resources, it would be very important to identify those patients who have a higher risk for developing secondary malignancies, to be able to follow them, and to try to prevent as much as possible. Taking into consideration that, of course, when we look at secondary malignancies, we are always looking at patients who have been treated with treatment strategies that are not the ones that we are using right now, that have the objective, amongst others, to decrease the incidence of secondary malignancies, but secondary malignancies still represent one of the biggest or the most frequent causes for late mortality in these patients.
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