Evaluating patterns of care for early-stage low-grade follicular lymphoma in the rituximab era

Abstract

Radiotherapy (RT) utilization for early-stage, low-grade follicular lymphoma (FL) is low despite treatment guideline recommendations. We compare treatment trends for early-stage FL in the era of involved-site RT and rituximab. We identified 11,645 patients in the National Cancer Database (NCDB) with stage I–II, grade 1–2 nodal or extranodal FL diagnosed 2011–2017, with median follow-up of 44 months. From 2011 to 2017, RT utilization rates decreased from 33.4% to 22.4%, observation decreased from 65.3% to 49.7%, chemoimmunotherapy increased from 0.5% to 15.0%, immuno-monotherapy increased from 0.6% to 10.2%, and RT + systemic therapy increased from 0.6% to 2.5%. RT utilization remains low in the involved-site RT and rituximab era.

Keywords:

• Radiation
• follicular lymphoma
• low grade
• early stage
• immunotherapy
• rituximab

Presentation

This work was presented in abstract form as a poster presentation at the 2021 American Radium Society meeting.

Disclosure of statement

All authors report no conflicts of interest, financial or otherwise. Dr. Stephens has received research funding from Acerta Pharma, Gilead Sciences, Karyopharm Therapeutics, Mingsight, Arqule, Novartis, Verastem, Juno Therapeutics. She has received consulting fees from Pharmacyclics/Janssen, Karyopharm Therapeutics, Beigene, AstraZeneca, Abbvie, CSL Behring, Celegene, TG Therapeutics, and Innate Pharma. Dr. Tao serves on a cholangiocarcinoma advisory board for QED Therapeutics, Helsinn, and The Lynx Group, outside of this work.

Data availability statement

Data was collected from the National Cancer Database which is managed by the American College of Surgeons. Access to de-identified aggregated data can be requested through the American College of Surgeons.