Male1: Sometimes doctor refer to you lumps in the body and you come back with a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s, what is that?
Male2: Those are essentially the cousins if you want of leukemia. It is a form of cancer and involves cells that are fairly similar to the one that we discussed briefly for the acute lymphoblastic leukemia, but they present themselves in a different fashion.
The cells do not tend to be all over the body, but they tend to be more localized in big lumps in the lymph nodes and in other organs that are involved. The Hodgkin’s is thought as the second cousin because it is a lithe further away from leukemia. Some of the so-called non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma are almost interchangeable with leukemia itself.
Male1: What are the distinctions with Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin, how is that distinguished?
Male2: Because the one disease tends to be somewhat more aggressive and something to be a little bit more indolent, not as fast growing.
Male1: Which one?
Male2: The non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas tend to be generally more aggressive in a child, while instead the non-Hodgkin’s can be a lump that may have been felt for months. Patients may not have paid a lot of attention to it and it takes a while sometimes to even come up with the diagnosis because it tends to not necessarily be so symptomatic.
Male1: And do we win the battle against these particular diseases?
Male2: Yes, these diseases as well as leukemia had a very high rate of cure and when we say cure, we by the way mean the fact that the disease does not come back. This is not a remission. This is not a—
Male1: How high is the rate?
Male2: The rate of cure in this disease is very similar to leukemia. It is in the 85—for some of them, even 90%. The non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas as well as Hodgkin’s disease have a variety. It comes in a variety of colors and taste.
Male1: Some of these lymphomas in the late stages and still be cured, can they?
Male2: That is correct. Even disseminated a disease is highly curable in a number of these circumstances.
Male1: It depends on the response of the medicine, is that correct?
Male2: That is correct and even actually patients who have failed, who have what is called a recurrence often enough, there is a very good hope with additional treatment that we can cure this patient. As a matter of fact, it is relevant to say that the first insinuation of like Hodgkin’s where in the old time, remission therapy was the mainstream of treatment, we are now moving back. We are trying to give less treatment because of the potential toxicity because we know that the combination of different drugs actually can do the job as well and sometimes, potentially better.
Male1: This has been coming out of this cooperative study amongst others?
Male2: A lot of this information and the results have come out of studies.
Male1: So it is sort of like fine tuning what we are doing?
Male2: At the moment, if you look at where we are in cancer medicine, we have in spite of the press that has occurred recently, very few really knew drugs. What we are doing right now, aside from looking very hard for new drugs, is to actually fine tuning and understanding better how to manage these patients with the drugs that we have had for a very long time. And that is important because we are trying to achieve the same results—a high degree of cure with less problems, less complication, less destruction of normal tissue and that is an important aspect.
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