MONDAY, June 17, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Dramatic results from an experiment with people suffering from a form of lymphoma are demonstrating an extended remission rate where none existed before.
High-dose radioimmunotherapy (RIT) offers long-term remission for people with mantle cell lymphoma, according to research presented today at the Society of Nuclear Medicine's annual meeting in Los Angeles.
Mantle cell lymphoma is also known as a B-cell lymphoma, an often-fatal form of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. About 1,300 new cases occur yearly in the United States. People with mantle cell lymphoma rarely live more than three years after diagnosis.
Here's a description of radioimmunotherapy from the University of California at Davis' Cancer Center: "Radioimmunotherapy is systemic radiation therapy using monoclonal antibodies tagged with radioactive isotopes that target tumor cells... radioimmunotherapy is used in treating metastatic breast cancer, B-cell lymphomas, and prostate cancer that has not responded to conventional hormone ablation therapy."
The German study presented today included 12 people with mantle cell lymphoma who had relapsed after receiving high-dose chemotherapy. In the study, the people were given either low-dose rituxan (an anti-lymphoma chemotherapy drug) with RIT or a high-dose regimen of the same therapy.
There was complete remission in seven of the eight patients who received the high-dose RIT, compared to only one of four people treated with low-dose RIT. The other patient who received the high-dose RIT had a partial remission.
After 42 months, seven of the eight high-dose patients were still alive and six of them were in complete remission, the researchers said.
More information
This material from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society describes various types of lymphomas and what treatments are available.
