Male1: Many times, when they draw a blood sheet, they come out with some diagnosis and things like Hodgkin's disease, non-Hodgkin's disease, what does these trends mean?
Male2: These are different types of lymphomas. Lymphomas are tumors of the lymph system which are circulated by blood cells that are located in the lymph nodes or the glands.
Male1: How common are they?
Male2: Lymphomas are the third most common malignant group after leukemias and brain tumors. Now these also, if they give you these diagnoses, sometimes it maybe is reflective of an underlying leukemia and it is just that you have diagnosed from the lymph node before getting to the bone marrow.
Male1: That is a kind of cancer, sometimes, the stage is not as critical. It is how the effectivenes of the medicine you are using, is that true?
Male2: The stage is not as critical typically in lymphoma. The biology of the disease is much more important so that—
Male1: So you can these are sensitive or not sensitive?
Male2: Right, some will respond very nicely to chemotherapy and you can have it all over the place and have a stage four, which means it can be in the bone marrow as well, versus other types of lymphomas that are very aggressive and are less responsive even if you have localized disease can be much more difficult to treat.
Male1: So if you get a lymphoma and it does work with the medicine, you expect to get a cure?
Male2: Yes, I mean the cure rate is overall, lymphomas are very good. You are looking in 80% to 90% ranges and some lymphomas that we use to consider very difficult to treat now are curable greater than 90% of the time.
Male1: If for some reason that chemotherapy does not work, do you ever consider things like bone marrow transplants?
Male2: Yes, in patients who have refractory lymphomas, going to a bone marrow transplant can be effective. When we look at the bone marrow transplant, what we are doing it for is something called immunotherapy or using the immune system to treat this. Meaning that you take the immune system from a different person, transplant it into the patient and the goal is for that person's immune system to recognize the lymphoma cell is foreign and to continue to attack it and what can happen is, as the immune system recognizes the patient as the patient becomes tolerant to the patient, but not to the lymphoma and can help cure the lymphoma.
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