Autologous Bone Marrow Transplantation - Blog Science Connections

High-Dose Chemotherapy and Autologous Bone
Marrow Transplantation in Resistant Advanced
Hodgkin's Disease
Angelo M. Carella, Gino Santini, Eugenia Gaozza,
Angela Congiu, and Sandro Nati
A high proportion of patients with untreated advanced Hodgkin's disease may
be cured with MOPP (mechlorethamine, Oncovin [vincristine], procarbazine,
prednisone) therapy alone (1) or MOPP combined with other intermittent,
non-cross-resistant oncolytic regimens, such as ABVD (Adriamycin [doxorubicin],
bleomycin, vinblastine, dacarbazine) (2-5) or ABV (ABVD without
dacarbazine), or CAD (CCNC1 [lomustine], melphalan, vindesine) (6). Despite
these results, there are still patients whose disease is refractory to first-line
chemotherapy or who relapse soon after responding. For such cases, the
optimal management remains to be established, even if new second- and
third-line salvage therapy result in a 20-25% 3-year disease-free survival (7,8).
For patients whose disease is refractory to or who relapse soon after second- or
third-line protocols, the prognosis is very poor (9). However, some encouraging
results have been obtained with high-dose chemotherapy and autologous bone
marrow transplantation (ABMT) (10), including ours with 28 patients. We report
those results here.
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