SOHO 2020: Interim Analysis of Real-World Registry of Elderly Patients With CLL
Posted: Friday, October 2, 2020
For patients aged 75 years or older with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), an analysis of real-world patients presented at the 2020 Society of Hematologic Oncology (SOHO) Annual Meeting (Abstract CLL-185) found an underutilization of cytogenetic and molecular testing and recognized it as an unmet need in this elderly patient population. Jeff P. Sharman, MD, of the Willamette Valley Cancer Institute, Eugene, Oregon, and colleagues noted this lack could potentially lead to suboptimal treatment selection for these patients.
“Whether the lower testing frequency in patients aged ≥ 75 years results in decreased chemoimmunotherapy use may warrant further investigation,” the authors said.
The authors focused on patient data from the informCLL registry to identify subjects with previously untreated CLL who were aged 65 years or older and had received single-agent-ibrutinib, chemoimmunotherapy, or immunotherapy. The analysis included 449 elderly patients, most of whom had an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status of up to 1 and a Charlson Comorbidity Index score of up to 1.
The most common comorbidities of the patients were hypertension (69.3%), other cardiovascular diseases (29.2%), non-CLL malignancies (26.3%), and connective tissue disease (24.5%). The authors found that patients had low documented rates of cytogenetic and molecular testing, including for TP53, IGHV, and CLL fluorescence in situ hybridization. Of the patients, 202 were treated with ibrutinib (45.0%), 170 received chemoimmunotherapy (37.9%), and 77 received immunotherapy (17.1%).
“The data do not show an association between cytogenetic/molecular testing and treatment choice of ibrutinib versus chemoimmunotherapy or immunotherapy, but this observation was limited by the small number of patients who received testing,” the authors noted.
Disclosure: No disclosure information for the study authors was provided.
