Long-term survival in patients with newly diagnosed primary central nervous system lymphoma treated with dexamethasone, etoposide, ifosfamide and carboplatin chemotherapy and whole-brain radiation therapy

Abstract

In the present study, we aimed to evaluate the safety and efficacy of DeVIC (dexamethasone, etoposide, ifosfamide and carboplatin) chemotherapy for the treatment of patients with primary central nervous system lymphoma (PCNSL). We retrospectively examined 21 patients with newly diagnosed PCNSL who received DeVIC chemotherapy followed by whole-brain radiation therapy (WBRT). The median progression-free survival (PFS) in all patients was 37.4 months and the median duration of overall survival (OS) was 47.8 months. Notably, the median duration of OS was significantly longer in patients who achieved a complete response (CR) after DeVIC chemotherapy (49.0 months) than in those without CR (12.8 months). Furthermore, we found that the overall response rate to the initial DeVIC chemotherapy was 95.2%. No treatment-related deaths were observed. Our study investigated the efficacy of DeVIC chemotherapy in PCNSL patients, and found it to result in favorable survival outcomes in these patients, thus warranting further investigation of it as a therapeutic measure against PCNSL.

Keywords::

• Lymphoma and Hodgkin disease
• chemotherapeutic approaches
• radiation

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid (B) for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, Japan (A.N.).

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