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EHA 2025 | Real-world evidence and patient experiences in R/R CLL
Dima El-Sharkawi, MB, BS, MA, PhD, MRCP, FRCPath, The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK, discusses real-world evidence and patient experiences in relapsed/refractory (R/R) chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). She highlights survey findings showing that patients reported a rapid reduction in symptom burden after starting treatment, whether with continuous BTK inhibitors or venetoclax plus rituximab. This interview took place at the 30th Congress of the European Hematology Association (EHA) in Milan, Italy.
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Transcript
We conducted a study in the UK exploring the patient experience of treatment. So it was their first targeted therapy but in the relapsed/refractory setting. And so all these patients, it was a hundred patients in total, had had chemoimmunotherapy as their first lot of treatment, and they were either on continuous BTK inhibitors or venetoclax and rituximab as their second-line therapy...
We conducted a study in the UK exploring the patient experience of treatment. So it was their first targeted therapy but in the relapsed/refractory setting. And so all these patients, it was a hundred patients in total, had had chemoimmunotherapy as their first lot of treatment, and they were either on continuous BTK inhibitors or venetoclax and rituximab as their second-line therapy. So they all underwent semi-structured interviews where we explored not only the symptoms from their perspective, so moving away from the usually collected data of the adverse events and the grading according to CTCAE, but really finding out the experience from the patients as to how they feel their symptoms were, and not only describing and exploring their symptoms, but how much it impacted their day-to-day life. I think the things that we found from this study was that firstly, patients were really affected by their CLL at the point of starting treatment. You know, we’ve got clear criteria from international consensus guidelines as to what the relevant time points when you might consider treatment for patients or the indications for therapy. But it’s clear from this that patients are actually very burdened by their disease by the time they reach those time points and it is impacting their day-to-day life. What was also clear was regardless of whether they were on continuous BTK inhibitor or venetoclax and rituximab, that reduction in burden of symptoms really was apparent as soon as they started treatment. So they felt a lot better and could get back to going through their day-to-day lives, doing the things that they enjoy doing. We could, of course, see some symptoms getting worse on treatment directly related to the side effects of the drug. So for example, bruising increased for those patients that were on continuous BTK inhibitors, but by and large, the burden of disease and their kind of health and well-being improved on treatment. What was also interesting was we also explored whether patients were involved in the decision of which treatment was the right one for them, and about half of the patients felt that they weren’t involved in their treatment decision.
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