Obesity and Chemoimmunotherapy Outcomes for Patients With CLL
By: Joseph Fanelli
Posted: Thursday, August 1, 2019
According to findings presented in Cancer Medicine, obese patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) may have worse outcomes with chemoimmunotherapy induction than nonobese patients. These results are from a subgroup analysis of the international randomized AGMT CLL‐8a Mabtenance trial.
“Rituximab maintenance was able to overcome this negative effect of obesity and provide the same outcomes in obese and nonobese CLL patients, which suggests that increased rituximab exposure may be especially important for obese populations,” concluded Alexander Egle, MD, of the Paracelsus Medical University, Salzburg, Austria, and the Salzburg Cancer Research Institute, and colleagues. “This finding may be very relevant in populations with increasing [body mass index], such as western societies, and it should be confirmed in other trials.”
Researchers analyzed 263 patients from the AGMT CLL-8a Mabtenance trial who received rituximab-containing induction treatment for CLL. Patients were randomly assigned to either standard observation after treatment or 2 years of rituximab maintenance. Of the population, 22% were considered to be obese.
For obese patients, the baseline response to induction treatment was inferior (43.1% vs. 60.5% for nonobese patients) and fewer patients achieved minimal residual disease negativity after chemoimmunotherapy induction treatment (19.6% vs. 35.8%, respectively). Additionally, progression-free survival was significantly worse among the observation group of the trial (24 months vs. 39 months for those who received induction treatment). However, in the rituximab maintenance group, the outcome for obese and nonobese patients did not differ (P = .4).
Disclosure: The study authors’ disclosure information may be found at onlinelibrary.wiley.com.
