Rose Mixon, RN, and Erin Schuling, RN, talk with Maura Marden of Westport at a follow-up treatment after her bone marrow transplant for acute myelogenous leukemia.
“We are now moving toward a more personalized form of cancer care. We appreciate that blood cancers are a collection of several distinct types of cancers, and each patient is different. Improved understanding of the biology of each patient’s cancer will allow us to optimize specific therapies for each patient. In the future, we hope to extend this further, to prevent rather than treat cancers depending on individual risk.”
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Physicians and scientists are still trying to grasp the causes behind leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma, the three major groups of blood cancers. But there is positive news: Advances in care are increasing survival rates, leading to better treatments and curing an increasing number of patients with these diseases. The goal of physicians at Smilow Cancer Hospital is to cure blood cancers, or at least manage them as chronic conditions, depending on the stage and type of a patient's cancer. Highly specialized physicians with international reputations lead disease- based teams made up of specially trained data managers, research nurses, clinical nurses and care coordinators, providing each patient with highly individualized care.
Physicians are finding particular success treating patients with various types of lymphoma, the most common blood cancer, now curing up to 80 percent of patients with Hodgkin's lymphoma. Dramatic advances have also been made in therapy for certain forms of leukemia, for example, with the development of molecularly targeted therapies such as Gleevec® for a leukemia termed chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). The outlook for patients with myeloma, another blood cancer, has also significantly improved over the last decade, with the introduction of new therapies such as thalidomide and bortezomib.
Several Smilow physicians are also experts in stem cell transplantation, which is part of standard therapy for selected patients with leukemia, lymphoma or myeloma. For example, Yale-New Haven is one of a handful of cancer hospitals in the country to perform haploidentical transplants, which allow patients to be transplanted with mismatched or half-matched donor stem cells from a family member with whom they have only one set of genes in common.
There are no routine screenings for blood cancers, and symptoms are often similar to those of less serious conditions. But Smilow physicians urge anyone who is feeling a loss of well-being or persistent low-grade fever, unexplained weight loss, tiredness or shortness of breath to talk to their doctor about it.
